With the Zeppelin B & W landed a perfect match. But what sets the standards for the iPod in sound and design is now to inspire the home cinema. However, the 2000 euro expensive panorama is not as shrill as its model.
Picture gallery
The Zeppelin era ended in 1937 with a bang in Lakehurst. For the audio specialist B & W, the era of flying cigars began only a few years ago with the now legendary iPod dock in the form of an airship. While the traditional brand was thus a trend and finally made the iPod saloonable in audiophile circles, it left the competitors of Canton, Denon, Philips and, above all, Yahama, the first in the Soundbar Code>
In the new panorama, the price of € 2,000 already shows that the goal of Bouwers & Wilkins was a special one: the Soundbar convinces with a discreetly glossy aluminum profile housing with GRP reinforcements and is in the design somewhere between the B & W Zeppelin and a carving-ski >
B & W is encouraged by the successes in "airship construction" outside of the usual technology-loving hi-fi circuit, which is just as foolproof as a perfectly adjusted ski binding. At first, the chic remote control brakes, whose minimalism combined with missing on-screen menus, however, makes the basic settings unnecessarily cumbersome. A Hilti or similar tool you should not only have to hand, but also can be used if you want to hang the panorama under the flat TV on the wall.
Beneath the front panel is a piece of Nautilus technology in the form of a tubular chamber for the centrally positioned center channel tweeter, which B & W paid particular attention to during the playback of film dialiologists. Otherwise, the Soundbar relies on six wide bands and two 9-cm woofers with long, 90-degree, rear-angled reflex ports with flow ports against flow noise.
The integrated surround decoder does not process HD sound formats, which - like the renouncement of HDMIA connections - looks somewhat old-fashioned but is half as bad. Pure digital audio interfaces have so far proved to be the sonically superior connection. And the panorama bar has three of them.
In the stereo listening test, the British beam only allowed the two outer wide bands to run with the subwoofer in order to extend the sensed base width far beyond the limits of the extremely stiff glass fiber plastic housing, which is almost 1.1 meters wide. The project was almost spectacular. Like the Zeppelin, the panorama had forgotten its dimensions and just caused incredulous astonishment. Both base width and bass fundamentals have been very effective - especially when the moderate measures are taken into account.
Particularly positive was the fact that the round and richly coordinated B & W music performances like Clint Eastwood and Jamie Cullum (sensational: "Gran Torino" title song) did not give any artificial, tinny touched taste, which often occurs in this device genre. The homogeneous tuning without disturbing corners and edges could be compared with the very sound-strong, but also very large Canton-DMS systems.
The wall support supported the basic tone range and the bass volume, whereby the panorama could be adapted to the installation location very practical by various adjustment possibilities. In the surround-through, the auditorium once again increased significantly in all three dimensions and everything seemed more plastic, sovereign, powerful and self-evident. Although HiFi testers have always had artificial sound effects, the use of convincingly implemented surround modes, especially for live channel applications, can be strongly encouraged here, especially for two-channel programs. Even better: in films such as "Days of Thunder", the Stockcars flashed perfectly in the middle of the room.
After the Zeppelin, B & W lights up the panorama with a new level for a new access to the music and in this case also for home entertainment. The panoramic bars of this world are always high above the roofs and this panorama bar is also at the top.
No comments:
Post a Comment