Gallery: Inside Bang & Olufsen, Birthplace of the World's Prettiest Gadgets
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*The Art of Impossible: The Bang & Olufsen Story* is a new book by photographer Alastair Philip Wiper that documents in fantastic detail what's happening behind the scenes at the Danish company. Here, the guts of a BeoPlay A9 music system are laid bare.
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On a chalkboard at the Struer, Denmark facilities, a map of the user interface for the system setup of the BeoVision Avant.
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This specially designed rack is used to hold aluminum parts while they anodize. Seen here are parts of the BeoLab 6000 speaker.
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When polio swept through Denmark in 1952, Bang & Olufsen responded to the needs of patients—as explained by a doctor doing research on treatments—by creating a respirator.
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Wiper names 11 designs that shaped the company. The Beogram 4000 is one. Designed by Jacob Jensen in 1972, the automatic gramophone had two arms that worked together to make the record pickup happen at the same angle to the groove, as the cutter would have had during recording. It's high-fidelity sound reproduction, made to be "vibration- and dance-proof."
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Torsten Valeur, a designer at Bang & Olufsen since 1995, in his studio surrounded by all manner of prototypes.
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The guts of a BeoLab 4 PC loudspeaker.
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A crude model of a FM radio designed in 1995, that never went into production.
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Bang & Olufsen first started making remote controls in 1956. This BeoRemote One, from 2014, is much sleeker than some of the early ones.
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Designers at Bang & Olufsen make a lot of prototypes. There are geometric wooden, cardboard, foam, cloth, and even Lego models of in-progress products. This Lego mock-up is to test wheel movement for the BeoSound 5.
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One of the designs that shaped Bang & Olufsen, according to Wiper, is the BeoLab 18, an update on the company's first wireless speaker. These are the machines used to create the precisely thin lamellas, or the wooden front used on the tall freestanding speaker.
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Jan Thøgersen, surrounded by his private collection of Bang & Olufsen products—the largest private one in existence.
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The BeoCom 6000 cordless telephone, designed in 1998. It used an intuitive navigation wheel, like the early iPod.
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Acoustic prototypes of the BeoCom 6000 phone.
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Bang & Olufsen does manufacturing in its Czech factory. Here, assembly of a BeoLab 5 speaker system.
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The sliders and numerical graphics on a Beomaster 1200, one of star designer Jacob Jensen's 1968 designs.
