Beosystem 9000c: Rebuilt in Struer

Most CD players hid the disc. The Beosound 9000, launched in 1996, put six of them on display in a row behind glass, with a motorised lid and a mechanism that could jump between discs in seconds. Designer David Lewis is said to have taken the idea from a London record-store window that had laid out six CDs in a line. The machine became a fixture of a certain kind of 1990s room, turning up in Sex and the City, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Friends — less an appliance than a piece of furniture that happened to play music.

Bang & Olufsen could have marked that history with a lookalike: a new box wearing the old one's face. Instead, for the second project in its Recreated Classics programme — the first, in 2020, brought back the Beogram 4000c turntable — the company went and found the originals. Two hundred Beosound 9000 units were sourced and returned to Factory 3 in Struer, Denmark, the plant where they were first built. There they were taken apart, inspected piece by piece, cleaned and repaired, and put back together using the same tools and workstations created for the original production run decades earlier. Trade coverage of the launch noted that many of the technicians doing the work had worked on the first run.

A recreation this literal still gets one deliberate change. The original finishes are inverted: the CD display panel that was natural aluminium is now deep black, the overlapping control bar that was black is now aluminium, and the aluminium elements were re-machined and re-anodised so the player would sit convincingly next to its new partners. Because the 9000c is a system, not just a player. Each rebuilt unit is paired with two Beolab 28 floorstanding speakers in natural aluminium with a Cosmic Black base, and a Beoremote One. Through the speakers, the system streams as a modern one should — AirPlay 2, Chromecast and Bluetooth — alongside the player's own radio and those six discs.

The edition is limited to the 200 units Bang & Olufsen could bring home, and the system is priced at $55,000 in the United States. That is a great deal of money for a format the industry left behind, and the company is not pretending otherwise. What the price actually buys is the infrastructure behind it: a factory that kept the workstations, the skills and the patience to give a thirty-year-old machine a second production life instead of a tribute act.

Photographs: Bang & Olufsen · Bang & Olufsen · Bang & Olufsen