Beolit 20 size. iPhone for scale.
You must have a PhD to understand the technical side to these speakers - so I'll limit the context of this post to their practical differences.
To begin with, I don't think the comparison Beoplay M5 vs Beolit 20 makes sense, but since I'm asked about it a lot lately I'll do my best to explain.
The reason I don't think it makes sense is because they have completely different intended uses:
- Beoplay M5 is a home/stationary speaker. For single room use, it's one of my top B&O home speakers as I also clarified in here.
- Beolit 20 is a portable speaker with nearly 8 hours of battery life (assuming full-on listening) and 2.5 - 3.5 hours of charging time.
This is what your decision should 100% be based on. Portable vs stationary. Because, as you see, they are NOT the alternatives of one another.
Unlike M5, Beolit 20 is battery operated (meaning that it's portable).
Keep this in mind as you read further.
Sound quality, strength and propagation
Let me tell you something right off the bat.
The sound quality performance you'll end up getting from a speaker will always depend on your room acoustics - particularly room dimensions and speaker positions.
The impact of the combination of these two is actually so strong that in most cases, it doesn't even make sense to utter a single word on sound quality without speaking of them.
This is also why it's not unusual to see completely different reviews of the same speaker.
In one case the speaker might be placed in a sweet spot inside the room and hence the user might be satisfied. In other cases the same speaker might be ill placed and hence user might even have returned it.
The point most people miss here is that it mostly isn't even about the engineering behind the speaker itself. It's about where you place the speaker inside which room.
So, in order to solve this problem, I've partnered with Acoustics and Audio Engineering PhD Andrea Cicero from AC Acustica and created Soundton - a simple, 2D, browser accessible online speaker placement calculator.
With Soundton, now there's a way to figure the sound quality of most speakers before you buy them.
Read more about its working principles at soundton.com/documentation/.
The end colormap provides you the locations with the best (green) and worst (red) acoustics.