Bowers & Wilkins Formation Duo
Recent changes have improved ease of use for the Formation stereo pair, while their sound quality was never in question.
When Bowers & Wilkins released the Duo wireless speakers as the top offering in its Formation suite of wireless multiroom products, we liked them very much, and gave them a Sound+Image award. But we did highlight two potential issues for users. First was that they have no physical inputs at all (except for power); these are entirely wireless speakers. Second was they didn’t much help with the streaming either — the Home app which controls the speakers just helps set them up, then aside from onboard Spotify Connect it leaves you to work out your own way to stream, even going so far as to suggest Roon as the best solution, requiring additional and regular outlay.
But both these problems have since been addressed. The new Music app (pictured right) has arrived to offer far more in the way of direct access to music, including Tidal and Qobuz. And currently, if you buy a pair of Duos, you can get a Formation Audio preamplifier as a bonus — delivering two analogue and one optical digital inputs with which the Duo can connect. Hoorah. Sorted.
The Formation series, then, offers Bowers & Wilkins’ own wireless multiroom platform, capable of playing and streaming music in each room individually, or the same music to all connected rooms. Yet notably, like some of those competitors (and perhaps more than any of them), B&W is pushing to a higher quality, growing the pie upwards, as it were, perhaps following the maxim of company founder John Bowers when he said that “If you can make a better product, you can sell it.”
So the wireless connection between Formation products uses a bespoke mesh network operating outside the usual Wi-Fi frequencies, with each product dynamically choosing the optimal path in a not dissimilar way to the recent spate of Wi-Fi mesh networking systems. Connectivity options for playback include traditional home networking via Ethernet and Wi-Fi, Apple’s AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Roon readiness, and Bluetooth aptX HD streaming.
And in appearance the Duos farm certain key company attributes. They have the distinctive ‘tweeter-on-top’ borrowed from B&W’s 700 Series and others, the 25mm carbondome tweeters mounted in a Nautilus-tubed enclosure which flops over the curved top of the main cabinet, decoupling the tweeter from any vibrations in that lower cabinet, itself matrix-braced against such movement.
Behind the big circular grille (a wonder of concentrically-punched circles) is a 165mm Continuum bass/ midrange driver, B&W’s favoured midrange cone material — it first appeared
on the 802 D3, released in 2015. These silver-white woven cones have already trickled down all the way to the 600 Series, though the company remains tight-lipped as to what Continuum actually is, other than being its own synthetic weave, with an aluminium coating that gives it the shiny silver finish.
As for the Duo’s cabinets, we had thought from early publicity images that they looked worrying like a giant plastic computer speaker peering out like a periscope from the good ship B&W. But when you actually see the Duos, especially on their bespoke stands (pictured right), the effect is more luxurious. The decoupled tweeter chamber (it wobbles if you flick it) on the pair we listened to is finished in a gloss black, which contrasts with the matte deep grey of the main cabinet (they also come in white), which is formed from two sections that meet in a long curve back around and behind the continuous top and front section. The rear piece has four small slots through it, which we presume to be for ventilation rather than porting, since these are specified as sealed cabinets. The main pieces look like moulded plastic but are actually Formi, a composite developed around a decade ago using virgin polypropylene mixed with 20-50% natural and renewable cellulose fibre sourced from sustainable managed forests. The resulting granules can be injection-moulded in the same way as standard plastics. Formi has claims to strength and stiffness well beyond those of more common thermoplastics, while being cheaper than engineering plastics such as ABS.
This matte moulded material mates perfectly with the Duos’ bespoke fillable stands (as pictured above right, $1199) — indeed we at first thought the bottom of the speaker to be part of the stand, until we realised the buttonry was on that section. The stands can be spiked to the carpet, and although other stands can be used (or none, for benched use of the Duos), it makes sense in performance terms to have the whole designed package working as intended.
We must note that we didn’t have the Duos at home for our listening; instead we visited B&W Australia’s headquarters, left alone for an hour or two to bang through our favourite test tracks. Thus we didn’t experience set-up (though we did move them around a bit, and found we enjoyed close listening the best); nor did we feed them the highest of resolutions or the purest of signals as all our listening was done via AirPlay from music stored on our iPhone or streamed from our device using Spotify and Tidal accounts.
Mind you, that’s likely how a great many users will likely listen to the Duos. And the music sounded good from the first tune. Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side showed the Duo’s strengths at delivering detail, both in a well-portrayed shaping of Herbie Flowers’ twinned bass guitars and in the clarity of the panning and reverb on the singers during their entry at the end of the second verse.
As for depth, we didn’t initially feel quite the weight implied by the published 25Hz lower response (which we think can be taken as at least a -6dB figure); nevertheless there was something of the ultra-low bass in Neil Young’s Walk With Me coming through, and that’s in the 30s of hertz, so still a respectable performance, and once we found a neutral listening position in the room, the overall sound was impressively balanced (a sweep showed remarkable flatness up to 200Hz).
There is the option to wirelessly link in the ‘Formation Bass’ subwoofer to play with the Duos, but a spin through tracks by Tyler The Creator soon reassured us of the Duo’s own qualifications in the bass department.
And there is none of the feel of heavy EQ adjustment via digital signal processing. There is some of that going on here, but B&W has kept the Duos sounding natural rather than artificial, and without the characteristic of a pushed bottom and a dip above which occurs in so many wireless speakers.
Chick Corea’s Australia concerto was a delight in several ways — for the natural spread of its orchestral elements across and into the soundstage, for the dynamics which burst forth as the piece progressed, and for the impressive realité of the central drum work — the transient crack of a rim shot, the long audible extension of the ride cymbal decay.
This is where the Duos started sounding like something beyond a mere multiroom system product, rather a piece of real hi-fi.
Orchestral tones were well handled, and yes we loaded Diana Krall (with Michael Bublé no less) on Alone Again Naturally from ‘Wallflower’ to check the Duos’ treatment of female vocal, which proved to be another highlight. Ms Krall was velvety real, present and correct, as was Joni Mitchell on the later version of Both Sides Now, and also kd lang on our favourite tester of The Air That I Breathe. Their tone was also shown to be impeccable when we played spoken word, judging that from our own recordings of known voices.
What the Duos achieve is to take a multiroom system to a higher plane in itself (you’ll never get sound like this from Sonos!)/ While other platforms can power high-end speakers, to our knowledge only Formation has such a high-end pair of active speakers directly on the receiving end of your app.
“What the Formation Duos achieve is to take a multiroom system to a higher plane in itself; you’ll never get sound like this from Sonos...”