Review: Bowers & Wilkins Z2

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.

I have friends who live in the suburbs who use AirPlay speakers with few problems, and I'm sure there are countless others who don't have the same headaches as me. And yes, I realize that there are other tricks with your router that you can do to make AirPlay work better. But any streaming technology that comes packed inside a $400 speaker should just work. The average consumer can't be expected to pay big money and then have to spend an hour setting everything up properly only to end up with a stereo system that works almost as advertised.

So while you may have good AirPlay experiences, I have to send up a red flag. If you're looking for a wireless speaker, I would steer you toward a streaming technology that doesn't piggyback on your Wi-Fi connection, like Bluetooth. And if you want multi-room audio at a higher quality, I would recommend a system with proven rock-solid stability like Sonos.

Now, the second caveat. I can't whole-heartedly recommend speaker docks anymore, especially one this pricey. The dock connector on the Z2 is a Lightning connector, and there's very good reason to believe Lightning will be the only choice on all Apple hardware for a while. But $400 is not a small investment for a home audio component, and since B&W has always made very solid hardware, the Z2 will likely still sound excellent in ten years. Will you still be an iPhone user in ten years? And will that iPhone have a Lightning connector on it? Sure, there's an Aux-in jack on the back of the Z2, but if you go that route, you're not using a pure digital connection and the audio quality is degraded.

But if you're confident about your status as "a dock person," the Z2 would be a welcome upgrade from an earlier model speaker with a 30-pin connector. If you really want a dock, it does at least present a great way for you to go all-Lightning.

And the sound and looks are worth the cost if you're already fully invested in an all-Apple AirPlay system. But if you haven't yet made the leap to multi-room wireless streaming, the Z2 is a risky – and pricey – way to experiment.

WIRED Sound is natural, bright and full. Gets satisfyingly loud. Looks gorgeous, with soft-touch material around the top and bottom and a sleek metal grill in front. Comes in black and white.

TIRED There's an old Italian proverb* that says, "Your cart is only as good as the donkey you've hitched it to." And AirPlay is one flakey donkey. Charging dock on top only works with Apple handsets with Lightning ports – iPhone 5, iPod Touch and iPod Nano. $400 only makes sense if you're already fully invested in Apple hardware and AirPlay streaming.

*No such proverb.