Bang & Olufsen replaces CEO Tue Mantoni with Henrik Clausen, the result of "a dialog with the board of directors about [Mantoni's] long-term commitment as CEO once certain important projects had been completed.”

Clausen is the former CEO of the largest telco in the Nordics, Telenor ASA. He takes over the luxury audio maker from 1 July. In turn, Mantoni has been B&O CEO since 2011.

"B&O is an iconic brand, with state-of-the-art quality products and a unique heritage," Clausen says. "I look very much forward to joining the organisation and working with the team to further exploit the global potential."

Venerable British audio maker Bowers & Wilkins finds a surprise buyer in EVA Automation, a tiny Silicon Valley-based startup founded all of 2 years ago by ex-Facebook CFO Gideon Yu.

Financial details of the deal are not available, but a 20% stake in B&W was sold by Caledonia Investments for £24 million cash and £500000 dividend, suggesting B&W is worth around £122.5m.

Little is known about EVA Automation, other than that it employs 40 staff and has a vague mission of "making products that will change how people interact and think about the home." Post-acquisition Bowers & Wilkins chairman Joe Atkins takes over as CEO of the combined company, with Yu as executive chairman. It will also retain all 1100 B&W staff.

Wharfedale sets to build on the Diamond speaker range with the Reva-- a speaker series featuring many of the design principles from the Diamond 200 series, if with upgrades on build quality and finish.

The series consists of 2 standmount models (Reva-1 and Reva-2), 2 floorstanding speakers (Reva-3 and Reva-4, pictured below) and a centre speaker for home cinema systems (Reva-C). All combine a 25mm textile dome tweeter with one or more woven glass fibre bass/midrange cones.

Bang & Olufsen announces its smallest Bluetooth speaker yet-- the BeoPlay A1, a puck-shaped number measuring 13.3cm across and 4.8cm thick the company claims offers 24 hours of use before the battery needs recharging.

Inside the speaker are two 30W Class D amps powering a 3.5-inch full-range driver and a 0.75-inch silk-dome tweeter. Peak power output is rated at 2x 140W, while effective frequency range is of 60 to 24000Hz. A built-in microphone allows speakerphone use.

Denon announces "significant upgrades" to the Heos wireless multi-room audio system through the addition of Bluetooth and fast 802.11ac wifi connectivity, as well as support for high-resolution audio streaming.

Such features will first be available in new versions of the Heos 5 and Heos 7 tabletop speakers, followed by upgrades of the Heos 1 and Heos 3 speakers. The upgrades involve a new Heos HS2 platform featuring a more powerful processor (specifically a 1.2GHz ARM A9 processor) allowing the decoding of uncompressed WAV (PCM), ALAC, and FLAC files up to 24-bit/192kHz, with DSD and AIFF playback coming later via firmware update.

Samsung present what it claims is the first soundbar featuring Dolby Atmos-- the HW-K950, a soundbar complete with subwoofer and 2 rear wireless speakers able to rebound audio off ceilings and down towards listeners' heads.

The HW-950 is described by the company as a 5.1.4 system, since it offers x5 surround-sound channels, x1 subwoofer and x4 channels bouncing audio off the ceiling. The system pushes a total of 500W of audio power, thanks to the 160W amp in the 8-inch sub, x9 2.5-inch drivers spread across the soundbar and rear speakers, and a 35mm wide-range tweeter in the soundbar.