B&O Beoplay A3
iPad entertainment centre
Accessory of the Week Stick an iPad in B&O’s Beoplay A3, take a step or two back and look at it square on. It looks like a mini B&O TV. Put it down on a kitchen worktop or office shelf and you have a video player or jukebox capable of producing rich, full-bodied audio which does iPad far more justice than its own tiny speaker.
As well as standing upright on its long edge, the design of the back and sides of the A3 means it can safely stand in portrait mode on its short edge or be laid on its back, in which case it slopes at an angle of around 30 degrees, whether in landscape or portrait mode. I wouldn’t want to type on the screen while in situ, but that’s not what the A3 is all about.
The A3 has four speakers. Three 0.5in tweeters and a 2in woofer, one in each corner. Cleverly, it auto-senses the orientation of the stand and activates the appropriate speakers.
There’s a built-in rechargeable battery to allow you to take it outdoors. Controls are limited to a standby button and volume controls.
Audio fidelity from the A3 is, as you would expect, excellent. It’s deep and rich, with plenty of bass, and the stereo separation provides a wide sound stage.
The supplied rubber bumpers fit the original iPad and iPad 2, but B&O tells me that it will ship one for the new iPad very soon.
I have only two, minor, complaints. There’s no remote control, meaning if you want to change volume you’ll need to do it using the buttons on the side of the A3. And there’s no way to prevent an iPad from charging while it’s in the case, even when running on battery power. I’d like to be able to choose to save the battery for the speaker.
Other than that, it’s an ideal way to turn an iPad into a compact, self-contained entertainment unit. ®
More Accessory of the Week Winners |
||||
 Kensington
Virtuoso Mini |
 Hauppauge
MyTV 2Go |
 iLuv Vibro
Classic II |
 Belkin YourType
Folio |
 IK Multimedia
iRig Mic Cast |
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
B&O Beoplay A3
COMMENTS
Will there be enough room to accommodate the adaptor that will have to be used with future ipads considering their imminent change of connector?
B&O have always been vastly over-priced tat and nearly always has some stupid flaw. I still remember their magic tuner from the late 1960s where the cursor was a pair of tiny ball bearings seemingly suspended in mid air. They were actually in perspex tubes, and dragged along by magnets behind the fascia - trouble was the tubes weren't sealed and the balls rusted and stuck. Then there was the record player with the oh so finely balanced high mass pickup arm with a magnetic pickup - but the counter balance weight would work loose and fall off the end when you lifted the arm. The surprise resulted in lots of people dropping it whereupon the full weight smashed into the turntable (or worse, the record)
Re: Cute.. but..
@Tom - at least with B&W you'll get decent sound. B&O kit looks beautiful, but has distinctly average performance. Come to think of it, they may have identified their target market very precisely.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
