The new age of B&W
The new Formation suite of wireless multiroom audio really does represent a new age for Bowers & Wilkins, as it delivers the results of combining B&W’s strengths in traditional loudspeaker engineering with the new technical leadership of Silicon Valley company EVA Automation, which surprised the hi-fi world by buying B&W in 2016. The ‘Home’ app which oversees the Formation suite comes direct from EVA, and the six new products (see overleaf) communicate via a proprietary mesh wireless network able to stream up to high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz audio.
Hence we might call B&W’s new age an ‘Age of Wireless’, except that wireless operation is hardly new to the company. It’s easy to forget what a leader the company was in lifestyle audio when back in 2007 it introduced the Zeppelin, an active speaker system which was the first truly premium iPod docking speaker, arriving at a gasp-inducing price of $999. For an iPod dock? Surely madness!
But it wasn’t madness, it was the future. The Zeppelin’s exceptional design and performance showed that the company’s founder John Bowers was right when he once said that “If you can make a better product, you can sell it.” An ongoing series of Zeppelins tracked the changes from iPod docks to modern wireless operation. Other wireless products followed, both speakers and headphones. But an integrated ecosystem never quite emerged, until now, with the release of the Formation Suite.
It’s hard not to describe the Formation platform as a higher version of Sonos, since the product is aimed at delivering a similar solution as Sonos and its rivals HEOS, Bluesound, MusicCast and so on. This is another wireless
