Most B&O stuff is more show than go, though it's well-made, relatively speaking (expensive to repair though). Aesthetics-wise, many of their pieces are historically regarded as classics of modern industrial design, and some of the vintage models appeal to me very much on that level. In my experience, the only way one usually uses any B&O piece is within an all-B&O system, with the onetime exception (in certain locales) of their turntables. Given that their speakers didn't sound very good, and their turntables didn't play records very well (albeit that most others didn't either), it was always hard for me to make any evaluation of their electronics sandwiched in between. For at least the last decade, the company's focus shifted toward compact 'lifestyle' stuff that didn't have much pretense of hi-fi, and to me they also lost some of their sense of design integrity as well.
Their corporate participation in the development and marketing of the ICEpower technology and product could change their image within the high end segment, but I went to a B&O store to hear the new Beolab speakers which incorporate ICEpower (among many other feats) and they sounded, not just poor, but really quite incompetent. Not enjoyable or convincing at all - you could hear better at Circuit City any day of the week. Since I strongly suspected they couldn't truly be as bad as they sounded, I had to assume they were being used incorrectly. But even though I had the salesman reset the speakers' built-in measurement and self-calibration system in my presence after pointing out to him that they sounded like ca-ca, things were no better afterward. This is a problem, since you can't sell $15K (or whatever they cost) speakers if you either: don't know how to set them up right; or display broken ones; or in any case don't even possess the expertise to realize they're not remotely coming close to sounding as they probably ought to...
