Danish purveyor of audio goods Bang & Olufsen announced last week that its youth-targeted B&O Play imprint has collaborated with up-and-coming artist DJ Khaled and entertainment firm Heads Innovation to create the B&O Play H6 headphone. DJ Khaled is one in a growing string of artists and musicians who’ve taken a crack at their own headphone lines. Upon its release, the H6 will be the first in a series of customized product collections featuring a variety of different artists.
B&O’s press release for the announcement explains that Heads Innovation’s audio division is conceiving and customizing the products in tandem with B&O Play.
B&O describes its offshoot B&O Play brand, created two years ago, as “firmly grounded in decades of design excellence, craftsmanship, and product innovation … interprets the same values for a new type of contemporary products aimed at youthful, design-conscious urbanites with an active lifestyle.” For example, the first B&O Play product we took a look at was the $2,700 A9 Wireless Speaker, which resembled a kind of gong/bucket chair hybrid one might find at Ikea. The Play imprint is a wild frontier in which B&O can experiment with some of its more wacky brainchildren – naturally, the aforementioned young, “design-conscious urbanites” and technophiles are the ones who gobble up these types of releases.
On the other side of the collaboration is the entertainment company Heads Innovation, “originally established in 2013 as a sound technology incubator focusing on harmonics, engineering, art, and defining sound.” The company’s audio division today consists of premium headphones, portable Bluetooth speakers, and a surround sound music application “that will give the world a true ‘audio meets virtual’ experience.”
The video for “They Don’t Love You No More” – a teaming-up between Jay-Z and DJ Khaled that features a handful of other recognizable names such as Rick Ross – includes shots of Khaled tuning in with a prototype of the H6 pair. B&O’s press release contains no word on when the headphones are set to be released.