Some speakers can be found on shelves or mounted on poles or embedded in the ceiling, but the Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9, now in its fifth generation, is unique in that it is literally part of the furniture. Its exterior can be customised to match your decor, while its advanced electronics provide a reliable bridge to your WiFi network. Although you could use it via Bluetooth, given its high-spec connectivity (dubbed “Mozart” by Bang & Olufsen), that would be like playing Chopsticks on a Bösendorfer grand piano. WiFi or cabled ethernet connections provide you with Airplay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, B&O’s own software, and, if you have two A9s in the same space, native stereo pairing. The Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 is available for £3,199.
Assembling flat-packed furniture can be a stressful experience for some, but fortunately, the Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 is simple to set up. While it’s still lying face-down in the box, you can screw in the three legs, and as you lift it by the handle, it will naturally swing into a standing position. After plugging it in and detecting it via the B&O app, it will quickly perform a tonal sweep of the space to establish frequency peaks and troughs so that it can adjust its EQ accordingly. If you peek behind the removable (and machine-washable) cover, you can see what’s happening speaker-wise, with a stereo pair set into the left and right edges of the convex disc, angled slightly away from each other. An 8-inch woofer and another pair of full-range speakers are located at the back of the device, providing exceptional room-filling sound. You can adjust the balance of the sound via the app, but the initial tonal sweep is excellent and might not require any additional tweaking. The volume can be boosted remotely, but you can also swipe across the top of the disc. It takes three swipes to reach maximum volume, removing the possibility of accidentally disturbing your neighbours.
You can find all sorts of customised covers for the Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 online, but if you want your device to have true artistic pedigree, a collaboration with Ssense resulted in an exquisitely crafted combination of blasted aluminium and Danish Kvadrat wool. That’s musique concrète.
Until recently, bringing WiFi to every corner of your home was fraught with difficulties such as tortuously complex network configurations and dropped signals as you moved from room to room. The Orbi 960 Series, priced at £1,699.99, provides the ultimate mesh network for homes and gardens, covering up to 695 sq m and supporting a maximum of 200 smart devices. In my own home, one Orbi router and its two satellites performed the job of five relay units scattered throughout the property, and they offer some convenient features, such as app notifications when a new device joins the network, separately configurable guest WiFi, and a built-in VPN for privacy-conscious users.
Air purifiers usually rely on HEPA filters, thin mesh that traps small particles. The Aaira + HEPA air purifier, priced at £799.99, combines a HEPA filter with a carbon filter (to neutralise unpleasant odours) and an HOCI generator that produces a weak acid using a scoop of table salt dissolved in tap water. This acid zaps a range of bacteria and viruses that may be lingering. This top-of-the-range model is waist-high, but it deodorises rooms measuring up to 43 sq m smoothly. As it’s WiFi-enabled, you can ask Alexa or Google Assistant to turn it on and off, or up and down, while a dedicated app lets you manage timers, schedules, and more, wherever you are.
Most central heating radiators have thermostatic valves, but as a country, we often set them to “max” and let a single thermostat determine the temperature of every room. Tado, however, believes that this is wasteful, and its product range comprises a smart thermostat, a boiler programmer, and intelligent radiator valves that all connect to your network, providing heating control on an hour-by-hour and room-by-room basis. So, if a room is chilly, a single radiator can call the boiler for more heat, but if it’s not, it won’t. You can track energy usage with the optional app subscription, and decarbonising your home becomes a bit addicting. The Tado Wired Smart Thermostat V3+ is priced from £179.99.
The collaboration between Ultion and Nuki brings us the Ultion Nuki Plus, priced at £545, which can be retrofitted to nearly any front door. Although some people are wary of using smart locks, assuming that if their phone battery dies, they will be locked out, the Ultion Nuki Plus immediately dispels those concerns by providing a manual override, allowing you to focus on the advantages of electronic guest keys, remote locking and unlocking, autolocking as you approach, and logs of comings and goings in its app. Ultion and Nuki appear to have already anticipated any thoughts or doubts you may have, as they are security businesses at the end of the day.
