Are lifestyle, and audiophile exclusive design terms from one another? Is it a form vs. function debate? I’ve been struggling a bit with the concept lately in the strictest sense of the words, and the BeoLab 90 I’m writing about here brought the question to the forefront for me again. The 90 is about as far as you can get from a conventional audiophile loudspeaker design, yet with it’s $90,000 USD ($118,000 CAN) price tag it is firmly planted in ultra high-end audio territory. Could either muscle out the other when it comes to loudspeaker design (or any high-fidelity product for that matter)? I think yes, and it can certainly go either way. We’ve all seen our share of audiophile-centric designed turntables, amps, and speakers that are so single-purposed in their aesthetic execution (function) that many wouldn’t want them gracing their living, or listening rooms. At the other end of the spectrum, lifestyle-oriented hi-fi designers are meant to focus on the looks of a product (form), and integrating it into a home environment, with ultimate fidelity perhaps suffering in deference to that mandate. So if we can consider lifestyle, and audiophile as extremes of the same spectrum, where’s the median? Who’s working to bring those two disparate goals into the [...]
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