TIMELINES!

Founded by soldiers, seed-funded by a mysterious benefactor, Bowers & Wilkins has produced some of hi-fi’s most iconic designs.

A full 52 pages of hard-won hi-fi history. Nostalgic, us?

For a great many of the companies in these hi-fi histories prepared for our 30th anniversary issue, it all started in a garage. For B&W, however, it started in a shop — a small Worthing TV and radio rental and repair shop which had a sideline in providing public address systems for schools and churches. The partners in the business were Mr Wilkins and Mr Bowers, who had met in the army and gone into business together with a specialty in radios and the rising tide of televisions. But interest in high fidelity was also on the rise, and John Bowers — a classical music enthusiast in the grand tradition of solderingiron-wielding British boffins — set himself on the hi-fi trail after wondering why stereo recordings rarely matched the vibrancy of a live concert.

He was the classic “dissatisfied customer”, who like other designers in these articles spent time modifying then designing loudspeakers in the converted garages at the rear of the shop (ah, so garages after all), more for himself than as a business. But his ideas must have been infectious, because he was left £10,000 in the will of a mysterious Miss Knight, who left the money to Bowers on the understanding he would pursue his research into improving the sound of loudspeakers. It’s a bequest John Bowers has more than fulfilled.

So in 1966, at the age of 44, John Bowers officially retired from the retail business and turned his hand to professional speaker building. He was joined by his friend Peter Hayward, but the company took the name of the shop, immortalising Mr

Wilkins by default, perhaps because ‘B&H’ was already taken — as the short name for Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

The first loudspeaker design was designated the P1, four feet high and one foot square across the top, using Celestion tweeters and EMI midrange and bass drivers. It found sufficient success for an expansion to five staff, and for a crucial purchase — a Radiometer oscillator and pen recorder. Thereafter each loudspeaker sold would come with its own calibration certificate, as a reassuring mark of quality.

Gramophone reviewer John Gilbert remembers visiting Worthing shortly thereafter, asked to evaluate Bowers’ next model, the P2. He remembers John Bowers as a “slim, modest gentleman whose obvious enthusiasm, dedication and technical knowledge greatly impressed me”. The two became lifelong friends.

DM70: all their own work

The P2 was similar in construction to the P1, with another EMI bass unit but using an ‘Ionophone’ plasma driver for high frequencies. This remarkable device had no conventional diaphragm, creating sound waves through the ionisation and movement of air particles at very high temperatures. This could extend response of high frequencies as high as 50kHz, but the Ionophone required a high-frequency modulator which, unfortunately, interfered with television pictures, despite all efforts to screen it.

In 1968 the company released the DM1, a three-way infinite baffle design with again an EMI bass driver, a Celestion tweeter and a Coles super-tweeter. The DM1 and DM2 models were the company’s first domestic monitors aimed at serious music lovers — people like Bowers himself.

But the goal was to create a loudspeaker entirely in-house. And the level of the team’s ambition is clear from their next hiring of Dennis Ward, who was EMI’s technical manager with his speciality in just the driver units Bowers already favoured. Ray Greenwood joined from Rank, and with this dream team working on the technicalities, Bowers persuaded Kenneth Grange, who would become one of Britain’s most lauded industrial designers, to look at the external design.

The revolutionary impact of this combination is clear in the resulting loudspeaker, the Bowers & Wilkins DM70 (above). Its combination of a 12-inch bass unit with a wildly ambitious 11-segment curved electrostatic panel must have been both tortuous and expensive to manufacture, but it was as much a statement of intent from Bowers as the new 800 Series Diamond is today — fully created in-house including its drive units, so bringing the control he needed over every performance-related element of the loudspeaker. The stunning aesthetics of the DM70 impressed all who saw it, while the many complimentary reviews it received for its sonic performance put B&W firmly on the high-fidelity map both in Britain and increasingly internationally, as John Bowers began enlisting overseas distributors. By 1972 the company could boast a new factory, equipped with anechoic chambers

and sufficient measurement equipment for the team to continue innovating at every level. As Bowers said, “If you can make a better product, you can sell it.” Icon to icon The DM70 also marked the first of the company’s truly iconic designs. We picked the Nautilus to be one of our Ultimate 30 this issue (see p14), but several years before that came the Emphasis — famously featured on the cover of the Art of Noise’s ‘Below the Waste’ album. The Emphasis was the “graduate project” of Morten Warren, who went on to found one of the UK’s most successful design agencies and has been responsible for product design at B&W over many years — the original design for the Zeppelin iPod docking speaker in 2007, and the company’s first headphones, the P5, and more besides.

Though not the extraordinary Nautilus, the spiral curvature and lance-like projections of which are no product of industrial design — they are forms driven purely by function. By using tubes behind the drivers that reduce in diameter at a carefully calculated rate, and that are suitably lined with graded absorbent materials, the driver is ‘tricked’ into ‘seeing’ the ideal of an infinitely long tube to dissipate rear energy from the driver. At high frequencies, only a relatively short tube is necessary; at mid frequencies the length of tube is around a metre. At low frequencies, the required tube length grows to many metres, and the solution proposed by then-B&W designer Laurence Dickie was to curl it up into the spiral that defines the Nautilus aesthetic, as well as suggesting its shell-like name.

The 800 Series

But sadly few of us can foresee either a hi-fi budget or a home which can handle the likes of the Nautilus or the Emphasis. For real-world purchasers of B&W, the heights to be aspired

to come from the company’s equally-legendary 800 Series. Its first appearance was the 801 released in 1979, which was, as the original

brochure put it, “the first commercial effort to develop and produce a loudspeaker that would reflect the highest standards attainable without regard to any of the so called ‘practical considerations’ that inevitably compromise conventional designs.”

While that original decoupled its bass unit, midrange and treble drivers from the main enclosure, the second generation that launched in 1987 used the company’s new Matrix technology to brace the entire cabinet with a honeycomb of lattice-work. More models were added — room-friendly floorstanders and the 805 standmount speaker.

This range also added the yellow Kevlar midrange unit that for so many years became a near-trademark of the company’s speakers.

The Nautilus 800 Series arrived in 1998, with a more curvaceous floorstanding cabinet and a bass reflex system venting downwards into an integral stand, while atop the main enclosure sat the now-familiar midrange and treble ‘heads’ which made use of the tapering Nautilus tube approach from its snaily relative.

A Signature limited edition version of the 800 Series marked the company’s 35th birthday in 2001, finished in a unique Tiger’s Eye wood veneer, but it was in 2005 that the company introduced what has become one of its most famous innovations — the diamond tweeter (see panel overleaf). Introduced first in the top models of the 2005 800 Series, the diamond tweeter found its way across the range in the next reinvention as the 800 Series Diamond line-up in 2009.

The current 800 Series Diamond D3 series arrived in 2015, with a full range including the 805 D3 pictured right, excepting only the flagship 800 model which was released in 2016, marking the company’s 50th anniversary, and considered by the company to be a groundbreaking redefinition of reference-quality sound — “the best loudspeaker Bowers & Wilkins has ever produced”. This range marked far

more than an evolution — only a handful of components survived from the previous model (868 changes were made, the company noted with impressive geekery), and the cabinet was entirely reimagined with its curve now facing the front in a radical “reverse wrap”, the rear sealed with a spine of solid aluminium.

Gone is the Kevlar — the midrange drive units now use a mysterious ‘Continuum’ cone, while the bass drivers are now ‘Aerofoil cones’. (B&W can perhaps be forgiven for under-declaring some of the details here, given the mass-market copying of its Kevlar cone concept over the years.)

The 800 Series D3 gathered award after award, including our own top Sound+Image Loudspeaker Award in 2016. The range remains a highpoint in hi-fi reproduction.

Headphones & wireless

But alongside its ongoing search for the highest of hi-fi highs, recent years have seen B&W tackling pastures new. Its first headphone arrived in 2010, the P5, surprisingly an on-ear design, but luxuriously appointed and gathering good reviews. The headphone collection has grown to include in-ear and over-ear models — most recently we reviewed the high-end P9 Signature headphone, a beautiful object offering a level of luxury to which upmarket B&W owners may well aspire.

Equally important for the future direction of the company are the wireless headphone models, the P7W and P5W, showing that the company can combine technologies old and new in successful relevant products even in today’s crowded headphone market. The Zeppelin Wireless carries the company’s wireless expertise to the home, and with last year’s surprise purchase of the entire company by Silicon Valley “start-up” EVA Automation under entrepreneur Gideon Yu, it seems we can look forward to a major expansion in streaming and connected products under the B&W brand.

Cinema & subwoofers

This year at ISE 2017 in Amsterdam, B&W showed a whole raft of new products for the custom installation industry — which means you can now enjoy many of the technologies from the 800 Series D3 in a home cinema environment. The three new models for the company’s CI800 Series Diamond are in-wall speakers equipped with Diamond dome tweeters and Continuum and Aerofoil cones. The “Diamond Cinema” (pictured opposite) shown at ISE 2017 is, according to B&W, “a completely new level of home cinema performance… the ultimate 3D cinema sound experience”, combining the merits of overhead loudspeakers, improved audio quality, greater spatial control and resolution. All 15 channels of the system deliver equal sound pressure levels and, subwoofers aside, full frequency response. The 15 channels included nine of the flagship CWM8.3 Diamond models and five CCM8.5 Diamond in-ceiling speakers.

The subwoofers are new too — due for release in Australia in September, extending B&W’s DB Series from which the original DB1 took our top Sound+Image subwoofer award a couple of years back. This has been replaced by the new DB1D — the most powerful active subwoofer the company has ever made, with an internal 2000W amplifier driving two dual-balanced 12-inch Aerofoil cones again identical to those found in the

800 Series Diamond. An all-new digital preamplifier keeps everything running optimally.

So 51 years into its life, B&W has come a long long way from its shop-based origins, spanning the audio market from wireless speakers and headphones up to those world- leading diamond-class performers, and with a wild card yet to be played by its new American ownership. Wherever it leads, we expect that B&W will hold fast to its sound-first philosophy, and if it does, we’ll have more Sound+Image awards waiting in the wings.