Bang & Olufsen reinflate music files
B&O 's creative director wants to improve digital audio quality, writes Ben Sin
Johannes Torpe has a problem with the way most of us consume music today: tunes are either generated from a compressed digital MP3 file or streamed over YouTube, and usually travel through small, underpowered speakers on our laptop or smartphones.
It's hardly a surprising stance, considering he's the new creative director of Danish luxury audio electronics brand, Bang & Olufsen. But Torpe probably would have felt the same way last year, because, long before the 39-year-old Dane became a globetrotting design expert, he was a musician.
"The sound quality of an MP3 file is already low," he says. "Now we're streaming music, which compresses and flattens the sound even more, and playing it through the speakers of a glass phone."
His complaints have been echoed by other musicians but few are in position to do something about it like Torpe, currently one of the chief creative minds of a company which has a long legacy of building audio equipment.
B&O has created the "Playmaker", a box that takes the music coming out of your mobile devices or laptops, and, in turn, streams it to B&O brand speakers. The company claims the device has a "high-performance digital audio converter" which greatly enhances the sound.
The technology behind turning MP3 into a true high-fidelity sound is in its primacy. Other companies, such as the California-based Sonos, have introduced similar products, but reviews have been hit and miss.
