Bowers & Wilkins has been making excellent speakers in the United Kingdom for nearly half a century. The company's studio monitors sit atop the mixing desks at world-famous studios like Abbey Road, and its free-standing home stereo speakers have long been among the first choice for hi-fi nuts looking to upgrade from their Polk Audios or KLH Thirty Twos.
But most North Americans only became aware of the venerable speaker company when the iPod showed up. Bowers & Wilkins made the first really awesome-sounding iPod dock, the Zeppelin. The oblong doobie sat on shelves at Apple Stores, drawing the eyes and ears of passersby like a big, black, elliptical showpiece. The Zeppelin Air, which saw a slight speaker redesign and the addition of AirPlay compatibility, followed in 2011. The $600 price tag, while justified given the Zeppelin Air's power and sound quality, was just too high for most people to consider spending on a dock.
Here's something less expensive but still high quality: the Z2. Bowers & Wilkins has gone with a subtler design for its latest AirPlay speaker, moving on from the Brancusian whimsy of the Zeppelin and arriving at something more stark and universally appealing. The Z2 has a pair of forward-facing 3.5-inch drivers, powered by discrete 20-watt Class D amplifiers. There's a dimpled bass port in the back, and a tiny LED in the front to indicate its status.
And, yes, it's a dock. There's a lightning adapter poking out from the center of its bowl-shaped top. This placement is a neat design choice, because when you have the speaker sitting on a shelf or a piece of furniture at roughly eye level, you can't immediately tell it's a dock since the Lightning port is recessed into the body and tucked out of sight. Of course, if you stick an iPhone into it, the speaker's dockiness becomes obvious. But when it's sitting on the shelf sans-iPhone (which is most of the time) it's just a nice, minimal piece of sculpture.
The sound is excellent, as I've grown to expect from B&W (full specs, including frequency response info, are listed on the company's website). I played a variety of different styles of music on the Z2, both through the dock and over AirPlay from my iMac in the other room. It shines regardless of whatever's thrown at it. The middle frequencies are especially rich, so acoustic music like jazz and Neil Young's gentler material is represented well. Also, the bass is truly lovely, with a meatiness that you can only get from a high-quality driver with a lot of power behind it and intelligent porting to help move the air. I found that the bass sounds best if you keep the Z2 about a foot away from the wall. I don't listen to a lot of modern hip-hop, but I put on some De La Soul and some '70s reggae, and both were just gorgeous. Ditto with loud rock (Nirvana, Mikal Cronin). There are few speakers at $400 that sound this good and this natural.
So it looks great and sounds great. Also, setting it up and messing with the configuration is very easy thanks to a custom app for iOS. But there are two things keeping me from giving B&W's speaker my highest recommendation: the AirPlay streaming, and the fact that it's an iPhone dock.
Have you used AirPlay in your home before? It's an important question, because the experience you'll get from Apple's proprietary streaming protocol is heavily dependent on factors like network signal strength, interference, and the physical placement of your equipment. In other words, your mileage will vary. And for me, it craps out a lot. Now, I live in a part of San Francisco with a pretty high population density – a search for available Wi-Fi networks brings up about 20 SSIDs. Even with the latest AirPort Extreme and a very strong signal, I continue to have bad experiences with AirPlay speakers. The audio stutters, the speakers disappear from the network, they cut out for 30 seconds then come back on suddenly. It's a nightmare if all you want to do is just make it through an entire Hendrix album without fiddling with your technology.
Testing the Z2 on my regular Wi-Fi network, I never had more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted listening. Whether streaming from both my iTunes server across the house or from my iPhone across the room, I always ended up frustrated. I took the speaker to the WIRED office and tested it there. Same deal. I also tried splitting my home network and setting up a separate 5GHz signal, and that improved things quite a bit. But I still couldn't make it through a whole album without at least a couple of drop-outs.