BANG OLUFSEN'S BEOSOUND 2 STILL CARRIES DAVID LEWIS' NAME

Twenty centimeters wide, 43.1 centimeters tall, tapered from a wide aluminium base to a narrower crown. Bang and Olufsen built the Beosound 2 in 2016 as a tower with no front, no back and no wall it needs to hide against, and the brand is showing it again this week in natural aluminium, credited to designer Torsten Valeur at David Lewis Designers.

Twenty by Forty Three Centimeters of Tapered Aluminium

The Beosound 2 packs a three quarter inch tweeter, two 2 inch mid range drivers and a 5.25 inch woofer into that tapered aluminium and polymer shell, driven by 105 watts split across five amplifiers, 15 watts to the tweeter, 15 watts to each mid range and 30 watts to each side of the woofer. It plays down to 33 hertz and up to 23,400 hertz, well past the range most listeners can hear, with a maximum output of 94 decibels at one meter. The shape is the function. A cone that narrows as it rises has no flat face to point at a listener, which is why Bang and Olufsen built its Acoustic Lens Technology into the top instead, firing sound upward into a lens that scatters it in every direction at once.

David Lewis Died in 2011. His Studio Still Designs for B&O.

David Lewis joined Bang and Olufsen in 1961 under Jacob Jensen and Henning Moldenhawer, then founded his own practice, David Lewis Designers, in 1982. He drew the Beovision 600, the Beosound 9000 and the Beolab 6000, the last of which now sits in the permanent collection at MoMA. He died on November 8, 2011. The Beosound 2 carries his studio's name on its 2016 credit line five years after his death, with Torsten Valeur doing the actual drawing, which makes the byline a continuation of a design language rather than a single person's signature. Few industrial design houses outlive their founder by half a decade and keep shipping work under his name at the same company he joined as a young Briton in Denmark, and the practice has now outlasted at least one Bang and Olufsen CEO departure since Lewis himself passed. Lewis learned the trade under Jensen's slide rule era Beolab 5000 in the mid 1960s before taking over the television line from Moldenhawer in 1968, so the aluminium tower crediting his name in 2016 carries five decades of the same house style behind it, not just his individual hand.

One Speaker, Three Hundred Sixty Degrees, No Front

Placement freedom was the brief. Valeur has said the tapered cylinder exists so the speaker can stand in the middle of a room instead of against a wall, and the electronics back that up: Active Room Compensation reads the space and adjusts the mix, Adaptive Bass Linearization keeps the low end even regardless of where the tower sits, and the whole system tunes through the Bang and Olufsen app rather than a panel on the unit itself. A speaker with a front needs a wall behind it to sound right. A speaker with no front needs none of that, which is the entire argument for the shape before a single watt gets discussed. Pick it up and the weight sits low in the aluminium base, the same low center of gravity every tapered B&O tower since the Beolab line has used to stay upright without a wide footprint eating floor space.

A Decade Old Speaker Resurfaces During B&O's Hundredth Year

Bang and Olufsen has spent 2026 mining both ends of its catalog at once, a 349 dollar Beosound A1 at one extreme and a 55,000 dollar Fragment Design CD system at the other, all of it landing during the same centennial year that saw a CEO exit in January. Posting a 2016 speaker now, credited plainly to natural aluminium and a designer's name, reads less like a new product push and more like the company reminding a hundred year old audience what the design language sounded like before the travel collections and the collaborations. At 20 by 43.1 centimeters, the Beosound 2 was never the flagship. It was the proof that a shape with no front could still fill a room, and a decade later that argument has not needed an update.