Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1-2nd Gen Bluetooth-kaiutin

The Bang & Olufsen A1 2nd Gen portable speaker may be expensive is a stunning-sounding speaker with an equally stunning design. Add in a very intuitive app and excellent battery life and there’s probably not much more you can ask out of a portable speaker. It might not have gotten the voice assistant feature down as well as a proper smart speaker, but we can forgive it. If you've got the budget, it's easily the top portable speaker buy.

I puchased the Gen 1 around 6 years ago. I was super impressed with it in every way and use it very frequently. So I decided to buy this for a family member who really wanted a portable and excellent sounding BT speaker. They were delighted with it and the quality is every aspect is extraordinary.

So, I bought two of them but found that one of them was faulty so I had to send them back.

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1 2nd Gen has incredible voice assistant support. It comes with Alexa built-in, though it relies on the Wi-Fi connection of your paired smartphone to work. It has no trouble understanding your voice, even if you're far away or in a noisy room. There's even a mic mute button if you want Alexa to stop listening to you.

When a product is priced significantly higher than its competition, there are two potential reasons: either A) it's a legitimately superior option, or B) the company that makes it knows its target demographic will pony up regardless of how much it costs. Most luxury goods are some combination of the two (think Apple or Tesla). Bang & Olufsen's second-generation Beosound A1 also fits that bill: at $250, the Bluetooth speaker hardly reinvents portable audio — but it does everything it does so well, I'm inclined to put it more in column A than column B. I love this thing.