Beosound A5

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound A5 is a portable speaker with a woven paper cone and an oak or aluminium handle, designed to be carried between rooms and out into a garden.

It runs on an internal battery and supports Qi wireless charging on top, so a phone can charge on the speaker while playing through it.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker itself and its own app.

On battery away from Wi-Fi it falls back to Bluetooth, at which point Apple Home cannot see it.

Before you buy

The battery is user-replaceable, which is unusual and matters for a product at this price that you hope to keep for a decade.

It is heavier than it looks. The handle is genuinely necessary rather than decorative.

For a fixed speaker from the same brand, the Beolab 8 is the wall or stand-mounted alternative.

Specifications