Bang & Olufsen Beosound Shape Cover — Cotton

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Shape Cover — Cotton

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Shape Cover in the Cotton finish is the fabric front cover for one hexagonal tile of the Beosound Shape wall system. Beosound Shape, designed by Øivind Alexander Slaatto, is a modular wall-mounted speaker system in which individual tiles take different roles — speaker tiles, amplifier tiles and acoustic damper tiles — and every tile is finished with a fabric cover. The cover is therefore the part of the system you actually see: it sets the colour and texture of the finished wall, softens the geometry of the hexagonal grid, and can be changed when a room is redecorated or when a system grows.

This listing is for the cover in the Cotton finish, as named in the listing title. A cover is a finishing accessory only. It contains no loudspeaker, amplifier or electronics, and on its own it makes no sound; it fits over a compatible Beosound Shape tile within a complete system planned around the Shape star rail mounting, amplifier tiles and a connectivity core.

Key features

• Fabric cover for one Shape tile: Finishes a single hexagonal Beosound Shape tile, whether that tile works as a speaker, amplifier or acoustic damper within the system.
• Cotton finish: Supplied in the Cotton finish named for this listing, giving the tile a light, textile front that reads as interior furnishing rather than equipment.
• Part of a mix-and-match palette: Shape covers can be combined across a wall, mixing Bang & Olufsen’s standard fabric colours with the wool-blend options developed with Danish textile maker Kvadrat.
• Changeable without rebuilding: Covers can be swapped to refresh a wall’s colour scheme or to match new decor, without replacing the tiles, rails or electronics behind them.
• Consistent tile geometry: Made for the standard Shape tile format, 36.4 cm wide by 32.0 cm high, so covers align across speaker, amplifier and damper tiles in one continuous pattern.
• Lightweight textile construction: The fabric cover adds 0.4 kg to a tile, in line with Bang & Olufsen’s published tile weights for the Shape system.

The Shape system the cover belongs to

Understanding the cover means understanding the wall it finishes. A Beosound Shape installation is built on star rails fixed to the wall, with a 6 mm air gap between cabinet and wall. Speaker tiles each carry a 5¼ inch woofer and a ¾ inch tweeter; amplifier tiles each provide eight 80 watt Class D amplifier channels and can drive up to four speaker tiles; damper tiles absorb sound to tame room reflections and can also serve as empty tiles that conceal cables or power supplies. Bang & Olufsen publishes system maximums of 11 amplifier tiles and 44 speaker tiles, with no limit on damper tiles, and a recommended room size of 20 to 100 square metres. Every one of those tile types takes the same fabric cover, which is what allows a wall of mixed-function tiles to present one unbroken textile surface.

Fabric, colour and the Kvadrat options

Bang & Olufsen describes the Shape tile materials as knitted fabric over a polymer structure, and the covers are the interchangeable element of that design. Alongside its own fabric palette — colours published for the range include Parisian Night Blue, Purple Heart, Infantry Green, Brazilian Clay, Wild Dove Grey and Black, with later additions such as Warm Taupe — the collaboration with Kvadrat adds wool-blend fabrics in Brown, Moss Green, Pink and Dark Blue. A Cotton cover sits naturally in multi-colour layouts as the pale, neutral element against which deeper Kvadrat or standard colours are placed, and because covers are individual, one tile can be re-covered to rebalance a whole composition. Note that the exact fabric composition and colour code for the Cotton finish are as supplied for this listing; the cover’s role and fitting are the standard Shape cover described here.

Fitting and use

The cover fits the hexagonal face of its tile as part of the tile assembly on the star rail system; the complete layout — which tiles amplify, which reproduce sound and which damp — should be planned before installation, following Bang & Olufsen’s Shape documentation for rail fixing, cabling and configuration. Covers are the natural spare part for Shape owners: a replacement for a marked cover, a colour change for a new interior scheme, or the finishing piece for tiles added when a system is extended with more speakers or more damping.

For an existing Beosound Shape installation, the cover is a small part with an outsized effect, because it is the system’s entire visible surface. In the Cotton finish it keeps the wall light and textile-led, exactly as the Shape concept intends: a speaker system that presents itself as part of the room’s furnishing.