Bang & Olufsen continues to extend its brand outside its core luxury A/V lineup with the announcement it’s bringing its audio expertise to LG smartphones.
Last year, B&O teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to custom tune select notebooks, desktops, tablets and accessories, adding the Bang & Olufsen or B&O Play brands to specific products.
The Bang & Olufsen brand also appears on the OEM sound systems of luxury vehicles, although Harman International bought the company’s OEM autosound business in 2015.
With the latest announcement, Bang & Olufsen’s B&O Play unit will collaborate to improve audio on LG smartphones, the first of which is expected to be introduced at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Details will be announced Sunday.
B&O Play is a sub-brand launched in 2012 to expand Bang & Olufsen’s customer base to a younger demographic via more affordable portable A/V products.
“The collaboration gives us the opportunity to bring B&O PLAY’s acoustic excellence to an even broader customer base,” said B&O Play Henrik Taudorf Lorensen.
Though LG is collaborating with a premium audio company for the first time, LG has offered high-resolution 192kHz/24-bit audio decoding in select phones, and its V10, launched last October, added a 32-bit hi-fi DAC from ESS Technology.
Under the HP deal, products custom-tuned by Bang & Olufsen feature audio circuits isolated from other signals on the motherboard, a headphone jack that reduces ground noise, and preset audio configurations tuned by HP and Bang & Olufsen.
