Bang & Olufsen has updated the Beoplay Portal, its sole wireless gaming headphones.
The Danish icon is better known for its luxury audio and visual collection, but in 2021 it took its baby steps into the gaming world. It’s perfectly understandable – have you seen the prices for graphics cards recently?
As we mentioned previously, it’s hard to differentiate the Portal from the rest of the B&O range despite its gaming label. This can be a good thing for those who aren’t a fan of the typically aggressive look of gaming headphones; The Portal is a pair of headphones you can easily wear to swanky outings.
And as a luxury product, they’ve spared no expense in ensuring comfort for users, starting with jaw-supporting earpads comprising lambskin-wrapped memory foam. The inner headband is also offset padded to relieve pressure and covered in a high-quality bamboo fibre texture to improve breathability.
Its maiden effort, released in 2021, was designed primarily for Xbox X/S but now they’re offering a variant with 2.4Ghz connectivity with your PC and the Playstation (via the wireless dongle). With Bluetooth 5.1 on board, the Portal can connect to your mobile phones or gaming devices as well. I’m told that it’s possible to use third-party dongles so that the Portal can be connected to multiple devices without having to keep moving the single dongle around. But we haven’t tested that yet.
The other notable upgrade for the PS PC version is the improved battery life of up to 42 hours (from 24 hours) with Bluetooth and Active Noise Cancellation turned on.
It also retains most if not all of the features from the previous iteration – at its core, the Portal has the same 40mm drivers, the earcups house touch-sensitive controls for convenience, and a host of useful tech underneath.
This includes beamforming microphones to cancel background noise and amplify your voice (Virtual Boom Arm), Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation (feed-forward and feed-back), dual-audio streaming to enable third-party voice chats in-game, Bluetooth 5.1 with aptX Adaptive for improved music quality, and Dolby Atmos to add depth and a virtual surround sound effect to whatever you’re listening to.
The new Beoplay Portal PS PC, $799, is now available in Black Anthracite, Grey Must and Navy at Bang & Olufsen Grand Hyatt Singapore, online and at authorised retailers. It does not replace the Xbox version though the earlier model doesn’t get the upgraded specs like the expanded battery life.
*Update: An earlier version of the article incorrectly implied that the new Portal could wirelessly connect to the Xbox like the launch edition of the headset. That is incorrect. B&O now offers specific variants for Xbox or Playstation.
