Bang & Olufsen

Bang & Olufsen built this New Bond Street flagship as a listening space rather than a shelf of boxes, so bring your own music. Demonstration tracks are chosen to flatter a system, and the fastest way to learn what a speaker really does is to play it something you have heard a thousand times.

The company was founded in Struer, a small town in north-west Denmark, in 1925, and has spent a century refusing to treat industrial design and sound engineering as separate problems. That is why its speakers are as likely to be specified by an interior designer as by an audio dealer.

Hearing high end audio London rooms will actually contain

Speakers, televisions and headphones are set up across spaces arranged to behave like a home rather than a showroom, which matters because a speaker that sings in a warehouse can be unbearable in a flat. Ask to hear the same track in two different rooms.

Worth an hour, not ten minutes

Ears tire and everything starts to sound good after a while. Two or three focused comparisons beat an afternoon of drifting, and the team here are used to customers who want to sit down and concentrate.