One of the best things about CES is seeing and hearing products that are still months or even years away from launch. This year, at CES 2025, I had a chance to listen to Dynaudio’s first soundbar, the Symphony Opus One. You can’t buy one yet, but the company expects the price to be around $20,000 when it’s ready — possibly later in 2025, but more likely in 2026.
That’s a helluva price tag. But like so many other iconic audio products from Dynaudio’s native Denmark, you’re paying as much for design as for performance.
The huge, 73-inch-wide, 1,500-watt speaker looks more like an air register from a super yacht than a soundbar, thanks to the aluminum chassis, fabric panels, and a series of 72 oscillating wooden fins that make up its front face. Perhaps not coincidentally, they remind me of the vertical wooden slats used by the legendary Danish design team at Bang & Olufsen on its Beolab 8, Beolab 28, and Beosound Theatre.
They’re individually carved from a species of Japanese oak. Unlike B&O’s fins, though — which supposedly play a role in directing sound — Dynaudio’s slats are mostly cosmetic.
Instead of keeping the Opus One’s array of 24 drivers hidden from view with a fabric grille (the way almost every other speaker company does), Dynaudio opted to fit the cabinet with louvered fins that stay closed when the soundbar is turned off and rotate 45 degrees when the speaker is in use. At launch, there will be two main fins and fabric color schemes.
Included with the Opus One is a baton-shaped aluminum remote control. It has so much mass, it feels like you’re wielding a lightsaber hilt. It’s dominated by an oversized volume dial that spins with a resistance you’d expect from a high-end amplifier. If you suffer from an irrational need to hold the remote while watching TV, you won’t be able to put this one down.
The marble pedestal you see in these accompanying photos isn’t included with the Opus One, but Dynaudio says it will be an optional add-on.
The Symphony Opus One is still undergoing some platform tweaks (the company hasn’t settled on the final complement of inputs, or how it will support streaming music services, for instance), but Dynaudio felt confident enough in the acoustics that they were willing to audition the speaker for CES attendees.
Our demo included a section of Lady Gaga’s Close To You, and a scene from Mission: Impossible – Fallout — the one where Tom Cruise commandeers a helicopter and then struggles to keep it from becoming part of the landscape.
What I heard was powerful, precise, full-frequency sound that delivers both musical and dialogue clarity, with plenty of cinematic, low-end punch. As with any soundbar, you’ll still need a dedicated subwoofer if you want to shake your home’s foundations, but the Symphony Opus One has no problem sweeping you up in its enthralling and immersive sound, complete with reflected height channel effects and surround channel fills.
The demo also included something I’ve never heard before — on any home theater soundbar. Dynaudio calls it “deep dive” mode, and it can direct sound toward the listener’s position such that they’d swear they’re listening to a private set of 5.1-channel speakers, floating around their head at a distance of a few feet. The feature was demo’d via Lavern’s Hold Me, and it was nothing short of amazing.
The effect is created using beamforming techniques from the Opus One’s numerous tweeters and mid-bass drivers, combined with a generic HRTF profile. HRTF stands for head-related transfer function — a calculation that predicts how your head affects the timing of sounds to each ear.
Normally, HRTFs are used when companies want to reproduce spatial audio via headphones: It’s the best way we have of simulating a full complement of home theater speakers from a two-channel left/right set of headphones. We have an in-depth look at the art and science of binaural rendering if you’re curious about how it works.
So the use of HRTFs in a speaker — even one with the considerable surround sound chops of the Symphony Opus One — is unusual. Unusual, but not unique. Audioscenic’s Amphi Hi-D technology (which I also heard while at CES) produces a very similar effect through products like the Razer Leviathan V2 Pro and Dell Plus 32 4K QD-OLED monitor. The difference is that those are near-field speaker arrays designed to work over distances measured in inches. In my demo, the Opus One did it at a distance of 8-10 feet.
Even more impressive was the level of control. I sat in the middle of three seats in the first of two rows. Behind me was a second row of two seats. As the demo progressed, the Opus One selectively targeted each seat with a deep dive soundscape. People in non-targeted seats could still hear the audio, but only the person in the deep dive seat got the magical, immersive experience. Each location needs to be calibrated using the remote, and a spokesperson told me that these “positions” may be stored for later recall.
For now, deep dive is just a flex — there’s no immediate practical purpose given that only one listening location can be targeted at a time. Apparently, Dynaudio is still working through the possible scenarios. Moreover, I didn’t have time during the short, 15- to 20-second deep dive sample to get over my initial thrill. Would I have wanted to watch a whole movie that way, instead of the more conventional whole-room sound? I’m not sure. But it was incredible to hear it.
Dynaudio says that the Symphony Opus One’s extreme 73-inch width is part of the reason it can target so many listening positions with its deep-dive mode. But I could easily see the company selling a less-expensive narrower version limited to a single, centered deep-dive location.
It’s hard to defend the Symphony Opus One’s price purely based on what I saw and heard at CES, but let’s put the question of money aside for the moment. For now, it’s simply exciting to see a new player in the soundbar space — especially one with a hi-fi legacy like Dynaudio — and even more exciting to see that player trying new things like deep dive.
Whether the final product is worth the investment is a question for the future, but I hope we get to answer it sooner than later.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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