Bang & Olufsen: A Century of Sound as Furniture

In 1925 two Danish engineers, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, started building radio equipment in the attic of the Olufsen family manor near Struer, in northwest Denmark. Their first product, the Eliminator, let a radio run off mains electricity instead of batteries. A hundred years later the company is still headquartered in Struer, still selling sound as sculpture.

A Ten-Kroner Logo

The early years had a design streak and a commercial blind spot. In 1934 Peter Bang designed the Hyperbo, a combined radio, gramophone and speaker in a black metal shell inspired by Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair. It was gorgeous and almost nobody bought it. Design Week puts the total at 40 units, and only one is known to survive. If the Breuer connection interests you, our Bauhaus history covers the school that shaped him.

The logo came cheaper. In the early 1930s a 16-year-old painter's apprentice named Henning Dahl Mikkelsen drew it and asked for a fee of five kroner. Svend Olufsen liked the design so much that he paid him ten. Mikkelsen went on to become a well-known cartoonist, the creator of the syndicated comic strip Ferd'nand.

Jacob Jensen and the Beogram 4000

The B&O look most people picture comes from Jacob Jensen. Over 27 years he designed 234 products for the company, and he was the lead designer on most of its major products into the late 1980s. He worked in the same era as Dieter Rams at Braun, and the two make a useful pair. Rams pared things down to neutrality, while Jensen pared them down to glamour. Our feature on Dieter Rams and his ten principles covers the German side.

His masterpiece is the Beogram 4000 of 1972. The turntable used a tangential tonearm that tracked straight across the record, the way the cutting lathe did, rather than swinging in an arc. A second, smaller arm carried a photocell that detected whether a record was on the platter and how big it was, then set the speed and lowered the stylus on its own. You pressed a button and the machine did the rest.

The Museum of Modern Art paid attention early. In 1972 it added several Jensen designs for B&O to its Design Collection, including the Beolit 1000 radio and the Beomaster 1200 and 3000 receivers. Then from April 14 to June 18, 1978, MoMA ran Design for Sound by Jacob Jensen, one of very few shows the museum had ever devoted to a single company's products. Olivetti and Braun had been the earlier examples. The show used a later version of the turntable, the Beogram 4002 and 4004, as its emblem, which tells you which object the curators thought said it best. Jensen died in 2015, at 89.

David Lewis and the Glass Doors

B&O's next chief designer was British. David Lewis was born in London in 1939, settled in Denmark and took over the role in the early 1980s, working freelance from his own Copenhagen studio. Where Jensen built horizontal slabs, Lewis turned things on their side and made the mechanism part of the show.

He designed the Beosound Ouverture in 1991. Then came the BeoSound 9000 of 1996, a six-disc CD player with a radio that put all six discs on display side by side instead of hiding them in a drawer. An early version planned for ten discs before the team settled on six. Dazed reports that the idea came from CD cases in a London shop window. Lewis also designed televisions, including the Beovision Avant of the mid-1990s, and a long line of Beolab speakers. He died on November 8, 2011, at 72.

The BeoSound 9000 became a film prop as much as a hi-fi. Dazed has tracked its screen appearances from The Big Lebowski to About a Boy, along with B&O kit in The Dark Knight and No Time to Die. Set decorators reach for B&O for a reason. Nothing signals money and taste in a single frame quite like it.

A Hundred Years In

The modern company still swings for the fences. The BeoLab 90 of 2015, developed with the German consultancy Frackenpohl Poulheim, weighs about 137 kilograms per speaker, carries 18 drivers and can switch its sound from a narrow beam to an omnidirectional spread. On October 8, 2020, B&O announced the Beogram 4000c, 95 original 1970s turntables collected and fully restored at the Struer factory to mark its 95th year, each fitted with a new oak frame and a built-in phono preamp so it would plug straight into modern speakers. The company reached its centenary in 2025.

The Danish design story continues in our Copenhagen design guide and our piece on Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair. For the Japanese answer to the turntable question, read our Technics SL-1200 history. More in the tech section, the audio hub and our heritage brands coverage.

Every one of those 95 restored Beogram 4000c decks was individually numbered and shipped in a solid oak box.