Bang & Olufsen is now 100 years old – which in tech years is basically ancient. And instead of rolling out a misty-eyed retrospective or slapping a “heritage” badge on something beige, the company decided to do what it does best when it’s feeling confident: make an object so over-the-top specific that it dares you to question why it exists at all.
The Beolab 90, already one of the most unapologetic speakers ever built, is now wearing two very different moods: Phantom and Mirage.
I’ve always liked when tech companies remember that objects live in rooms, not spec sheets. This is that idea taken to an extreme. Same brutal audio brain underneath. Totally different emotional read on the outside. And yes, that matters, especially at this price point.
The Phantom Edition leans hard into darkness. Not lazy black. Expensive black. The kind of black that absorbs light, then quietly shows off when it feels like it. The semi-transparent metal mesh is the smartest move here. It reveals just enough of the internal structure to remind you that this thing is engineered, not styled. Shift your position and the speaker changes. That’s not accidental. That’s confidence.
There’s carbon fibre everywhere it counts. Face mask. Base panels. Shoulder plates. Not slapped on for vibes, either. This stuff is layered by hand, which gives the whole speaker that rare “someone actually touched this” energy. You can feel the difference between something designed on a screen and something built slowly by people who care.
The aluminum structure underneath is just as serious. Pearl-blasted, unified, almost architectural. Beams and joints melt into one continuous skeleton, the way good industrial design always does. Even the trim rings feel sharp in the literal sense. This is a speaker that looks like it could outrun you, even while standing still.
Then Bang & Olufsen takes a hard left turn and gives us Mirage.
If Phantom is night racing under floodlights, Mirage is a gallery opening where someone spiked the champagne. It’s color, movement, and a little bit of joy without tipping into chaos. The fabric alone deserves its own paragraph. It shifts between sapphire and magenta depending on the light, and it never quite settles. The room changes, the speaker changes. That’s not accidental.
The aluminum parts lean into the drama. Five per speaker, each precision-milled, each anodized with bespoke gradients that ripple like sound waves frozen mid-air. They don’t scream for attention, but they absolutely know they have it. You notice them. Your guests notice them. You pretend you’re used to it.
What makes Mirage work is restraint at the process level. These components are polished by hand. The gradients are done in Bang & Olufsen’s own lab, not outsourced, not rushed. You can tell. Color here behaves like a material, not a coating. That’s rare, and it shows.
Both editions are part of Bang & Olufsen Atelier’s centenary run: five total masterpieces, ten pairs each. That’s it. Certificate, provenance, the whole collector playbook. This is less consumer electronics and more design-world scarcity, and the brand is clearly comfortable in that lane now.
Under all of this visual drama sits the same Beolab 90 platform that launched back in 2015 and still feels faintly absurd in the best way. Eighteen bespoke drivers. Beam-forming tech that treats your room like a variable, not an obstacle. Precision, power, control. The sound hasn’t softened with age. If anything, it’s aged like something expensive and slightly intimidating.
The debut happened at the new Bang & Olufsen Culture Store in San Francisco, which the company calls its largest showroom in the world. That tracks. California gets three of these culture stores during the centenary year, because of course it does. From there, Phantom and Mirage go on tour, which feels right. These aren’t speakers you understand from a press photo.
What I like most here is that Bang & Olufsen didn’t pretend design was a side quest. Phantom and Mirage treat sound as the foundation, not the full story. One leans into shadow and precision. The other plays with light and color. Both feel alive.
At 100 years old, that’s the flex.
