Second Chance Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Black

The Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin stands out with its appearance, but stands out even more with its sound quality. It is of an unprecedented high quality. Only the design is not suitable for every living room.

design
The design of the speaker catches my eye immediately upon unpacking. This elongated design looks a bit unusual at first, but it certainly doesn't look out of place in the right interior. The speaker is also nicely finished and at the top I find buttons to control the music. There is also a reset button on the back with which I reset the speaker to factory settings.

Connected quickly
I connect the speaker to mains power and download the Bowers & Wilkins app. After that, everything goes pretty quickly. The speaker is installed within a few minutes using the app and I now stream music wirelessly via WiFi. When there are problems with the wifi at my house, I just hold the connect button and it switches to bluetooth. I stream music in different ways.

Impressive sound quality
It hits right on the first song I play. What an unprecedented high performance this speaker delivers in terms of sound quality. It is immersive, crystal clear and reproduces a powerful and deep bass. It seems like I have several speakers in front of me, but it's really just one. Listening to music is a real pleasure with this speaker and I play all my favorite songs.

The design and build quality are top notch.
Very beautiful and iconic design. Definitely comes into its own in small to medium spaces. Construction quality is what we can expect from B&W.
Sound.
The sound is just about perfect for what you expect from a similar solution. If you have a decent source, such as a lossless format, all you have to do is close your eyes and imagine yourself next to the musician. One disadvantage, it is impossible to sit still.
Two real negatives
The WiFi can only be connected to a 2.4 GHz network. Finally, Apple Music does not have native integration with the app, so you have to rely on AirPlay. This means that you cannot play the High-Res Lossless. Not that most users would miss it.

This is already the 4th generation Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin they have kept the iconic design but have been without an iPod Dock for a while now. The build quality is top, the speaker feels very solid, which is important to prevent resonance of the housing.

The speaker supports bluetooth with AptX and Wifi streaming via Airplay 2, Amazon Alexa, the B&W app and spotify Connect.. But with this speaker I would not recommend bluetooth streaming, not because it is not good, but because you can get so much more out of this speaker via WiFi. can get.

The fact that you can clearly hear a difference between lossy and lossless files shows that this speaker displays a fair amount of detail.
So about the sound. It sounds really good, especially for a speaker of this size. The Zeppelin has 5 speakers, 1 woofer, 2 midrange drivers and 2 tweeters. This provides clear tone separation and very little distortion. What I think is the best is the low frequencies they achieve with a closed housing, no bass sport, no passive radiators. Just a closed cabinet with a lot of power, which ensures relatively accurate bass reproduction. And with songs like Unfinished Symphony by Massive attack, he gets low frequencies that you really don't expect from a speaker of this size. The speaker is very present, which means that I like to sit down to listen to good music, but it lends itself a little less well for background music. The speaker has a decent stereo image when you sit close to it. However, at a distance of 3-4 meters this decreases a lot, but that is to be expected since the tweeters are about half a meter apart.

All in all, this is a great speaker that I like to sit in front of to really listen to Hi-Res music, the speaker has good tone separation. It does have a fairly bright sound, but this makes details come out better. I am also amazed by the bass of this speaker. It's definitely not a boombox, but every now and then it hits such low frequencies that you wonder if there isn't still a subwoofer somewhere.

Amazon Alexa is nice but unfortunately only in English, Google Assistant is currently more helpful in the Netherlands. I must say that the microphones are top notch and you barely have to raise your voice to activate Alexa.