Xbox has added a touch of luxury to its extensive gaming partnership for 2020, by partnering with Danish luxury audio-visual technology brand Bang & Olufsen (B&O). This new collaboration, according to a B&O company statement, “will create a new audio proposition to cater for the high-end segment within gaming by leveraging on B&O’s core capabilities of sound, design and craft. This will include ‘Designed for Xbox’ functionalities, which will ensure seamless connectivity and an enhanced user experience.”
Christoffer Poulsen, Vice President and Head of Product Management at Bang & Olufsen, explains, “The gaming industry has grown significantly over the last few years across age groups, gender and countries, and we expect this trend to continue. The technology has advanced significantly in gaming, and enhancing the sound experience offers a place for us to play a key role. By entering the gaming industry, we want to do what we do best: delivering outstanding sound performance wrapped in astonishing design and solid craftmanship. We see a big commercial potential within gaming, and in Xbox we believe we have found the ideal partner to realise that potential.”
Matt Kesselring, Head of Hardware Partnerships at Xbox adds: “We’re excited for the launch of Xbox Series X later this year and ushering in the next generation of gaming. As we march towards release – we’re excited to partner with B&O to bring a new premium tier of gaming audio to market for Xbox and B&O fans around the world that travels with you everywhere you love to play Xbox.”
B&O are known for their lines of high-end technologies for both consumer and the home, such as their 8K OLED and 4K Beovision Harmony televisions, their Beoplay line of speakers, earphones and headphones. The company has a number of patents under its belt which may have lured in Xbox’s interest: Speaker recognition in multimedia system (2019), Apparatus for redistributing acoustic energy (2017) and Panel with a two-hand operated user interface for a multi-room media player (2020).
Big launch ahead
Meanwhile, the Xbox Series X is set to launch this winter; the console is the brand’s fastest, most powerful console ever, designed for a console generation that keeps the gamer at its center, offering the ability to discover thousands of games across four generations.
A May 28 blog post titled ‘Xbox Series X: The Most Powerful and Compatible Next-Gen Console with Thousands of Games at Launch’ by Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management for Xbox Series X, explains the company wants to compound top-notch visuals with immersive sound. “In partnership with the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, Xbox Series X delivers a new, innovative HDR reconstruction technique which enables the platform to automatically add HDR support to games... Techniques such as the Heutchy method, which enables titles to render with increased resolutions up to 4K, or applying anisotropic filtering to improve the final image quality bring these classic games up to modern standards, better than ever before,” writes Ronald, adding, “We are also creating whole new classes of innovations including the ability to double the frame rate of a select set of titles from 30 fps (frames per second) to 60 fps or 60 fps to 120 fps.”
