Bang & Olufsen: How a Luxury Audio Icon Fell From Grace

Bang & Olufsen spent a century teaching the world what expensive sound was supposed to look like. Then the world stopped caring what sound looked like at all. This is the full story of the rise and fall of Bang & Olufsen — from a borrowed farmhouse attic in Struer in 1925, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to a hundredth birthday celebrated in the same quarter the company cut its own forecast. Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen started with a device that let people unplug the batteries from their radios. Within fifty years their company was setting the standard for what technology was allowed to look like: Jacob Jensen's Beogram 4000 turntable with its tangential tracking arm, David Lewis's Beolab 8000 speakers, the BeoSound 9000 with six compact discs exposed behind glass. Along the way the Struer factory was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt by hand, and both founders died before the golden age their name became famous for. Then music stopped being an object. This documentary traces what followed — the 2008 collapse in luxury spending, the B&O Play years, the divisions sold off, a long run of turnaround plans, and a company that now makes record gross margins on a shrinking business. Subscribe for more long-form documentaries on the brands that shaped how we listen, and what actually happened to them. #BangOlufsen #Documentary #TechHistory