Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin Pro

Introduction

Back in 2021, the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin wireless speaker returned to embrace the digital age of streaming and voice assistance – and it was a mighty fine effort.

But like with its loudspeakers and headphones, Bowers & Wilkins clearly had an itch it couldn’t wait to scratch and tweaked several aspects for the updated Zeppelin Pro.

It’s the same look, but underneath the hood it’s been retooled like a car enthusiast giving his motor a new lease of life. Out goes Alexa voice control, in comes a revised driver set-up and upgraded digital signal processing. Good changes or has Bowers & Wilkins tinkered to much with a five-star formula?

Price

The Zeppelin Pro Edition is available for the same price as the Zeppelin at £699 / $799 but currently it’s an online exclusive to the Bowers & Wilkins website.

The previous Zeppelin is still on sale but it’s in its “end of life” status so once remaining stock is sold, the Zeppelin Pro will eventually replace it.

Design

• Airship-like design
• No physical inputs
• Integrated LED downlight

We’re onto the sixth edition of the Zeppelin series and aesthetically not much has changed. The Zeppelin silhouette remains a highly distinctive look for a wireless speaker and Bowers & Wilkins hasn’t reneged on its decision to omit physical ports altogether. This is a wireless speaker in the truest sense.

The changes that have been made include swapping the Alexa button for a Bluetooth pairing button and adding more colours. The standard Zeppelin comes in midnight grey and a lighter pearl grey; the Zeppelin Pro comes in space grey and the fetching solar gold of this review sample.

The stand is integrated into the body of the speaker, and features a downlight that’s been revised to offer over 15 separate colours with brightness adjustment settings for each.

There’s no remote, so for control it’s either the buttons on the back (playback, volume and the multifunction button), or the Bowers & Wilkins Music app. At the back of the stand is the power outlet (thankfully the cable isn’t a capacitive one), and USB-C service port and a reset button.

User Experience

• Bowers & Wilkins Music app
• Supports Tidal, Qobuz, Amazon Music and others

Set-up of the Zeppelin Pro is fairly straightforward, as the speaker is recognised quickly by the Bowers & Wilkins Music control app, after which you need to press the multifunction button to sync the speaker to your account.

The Bowers & Wilkins Music control app is an app in the vein of Sonos or Bluesound, whereby you can control music in the app instead of being bounced out to the native apps.

It looks very nice on both an Android smartphone and an iPad Pro. The Home page has a mix of curated content from Bowers & Wilkins along with content personalised for you, recommended playlists, tracks, and albums.

You can sign into services such as Tidal, Amazon Music, Qobuz, Deezer and last.fm. It’s no way near the breadth and variety of the Sonos app, but there’s always the argument for quality over quantity. There’s no support for Apple Music or Podcasts, which I’ve been told isn’t a technical limitation of the app but a decision by Apple to restrict access. Unsurprisingly.

Head to the settings and you can adjust the speaker’s EQ by altering bass and treble from -6dB to 6dB, enable aptX Adaptive Bluetooth (with devices that support it), and play around with the Ambient Light settings.

While using the app is slick and responsive, there are a few things I’m not as fond of. For whatever reason, when I go to my tracks in Tidal, the B&W Music app won’t let me shuffle them, so a track will play and then stop.

I also think that the search could be slightly better at zeroing in on tracks. It’s not a fundamental problem and maybe it’s just my peculiarities, but if I’m searching for a track that’s in my ‘favourite’ list in my streaming apps, I’d prefer that result came up rather than results of similarly-named songs.

It’s a slight pain point as jumping into the Library tab of the app shows all the albums and tracks I’ve saved across multiple streaming services, and who wants to scroll through hundreds of songs just to find one?

Features

• Multi-room with Formation products
• aptX Adaptive Bluetooth
• Alexa is gone

As an all-streaming wireless speaker, Apple users get AirPlay 2 (which lessens the impact of not having Apple Music integration) while Android users benefit from aptX Adaptive Bluetooth (or either SBC or AAC).

Aside from the services mentioned previously, there’s also Soundcloud, TuneIn, and Spotify Connect. Spotify Hi-Fi or whatever it ends up being called will be supported. There’s no Google Cast support, just like there wasn’t on the previous speaker.

Although Bowers & Wilkins has revised the speaker set-up, the Zeppelin Pro is still driven by 240W of amplification – more than the KEF LSX II LT (200W), Kanto Ren (200W) and less than the Naim Muso Qb 2 (300W).

Inside is a 24-bit/192kHz DAC though – as far as I know – the Zeppelin Pro only accepts a 24-bit/96kHz signal. Frequency response covers 35Hz to 24kHz.

Multi-room is supported with other Zeppelins and Formation products. The Zeppelin Pro does support a feature whereby you can ‘hand over’ music to a pair of Bowers & Wilkins headphones though it does require tapping a button in the app to perform the switchover.

Sound Quality

• Stereo effect
• Strong bass
• Warm presentation

The ‘standard’ Zeppelin had two 25mm double dome tweeters for the highs, two 90mm FST (Fixed Suspension Transducer) drivers to take care of the midrange, while the bass was covered by a 6-inch subwoofer.

The Zeppelin Pro changes things up. There are still two 25mm double tweeters but the new ones have been borrowed from Bowers’ 600 Series 3 loudspeakers, while the material has switched from aluminium to titanium (more open sound, better definition, more realism, according to Bowers).

The midrange driver unit has been upgraded with improved damping material and a revised cone to reduce noise and reproduce the midrange with more clarity and subtlety. The long-throw 6-inch subwoofer is the same, but Bowers & Wilkins has updated the digital signal processing to improve the overall sound and integrate the new drivers better, much in the same way it did with the Px7 S2e over-ears.

Have these changes made a difference? Very much so.

I felt the previous Zepplin struck a neutral and precise sound; sharp and clear at the top end, while firm and punchy with the lows, and a midrange performance that was crisp and detailed.

The Zeppelin Pro sounds warmer in tone to me, not as sharp – perhaps slightly less overall detail – but its character is more engaging. Bass sounds richer, the midrange more lively and musical in tone, while the highs are bright but also slightly richer.

The benefit is that the Zeppelin Pro has more of an emotional sound that was lacking on the more clear cut Zeppelin. Playing the Downtown Downtempo track from the Last Night in Soho soundtrack again, the Zeppelin Pro sounds richer with Anna Taylor-Joy’s voice, carrying more emotion than I remember the older Zeppelin speaker expressing.

With voices, the Zeppelin Pro reveals plenty of nuance, subtlety and clarity whether it’s Sufjan Stevens in Chicago or Anette Askvik’s in Liberty. There’s plenty of space for performers to strut their stuff and the Zeppelin Pro is enjoyably expressive in how it reproduces those voices.

It sounds warm at the top end of the frequency range, which reduces levels of sharpness and definition with Veronica Swift’s The Man I Love and Isfar Sarabski’s Déjà vu, but the highs are still bright, varied and clear with just a hint of richness in places.

It’s not a speaker shy from delivering energy or power either, but there’s always a sense of control about the Zeppelin Pro’s sound – it doesn’t get as excitable as I recall the original sounding.

There’s a strong sense of rhythm, dynamism and tempo that breeds a likeable sense of energy and confidence with System of a Down’s Chop Suey, and it produces a soundstage that properly spans the width of the speaker to create a stereo effect. The one aspect where I didn’t find the previous Zeppelin living up to expectations was its stereo performance – the Zeppelin Pro is much better.

The long-throw subwoofer driver of the Zeppelin Pro seems to drive bass harder and with more punch and energy in its performance. Masego’s You Never Visit Me has a big, powerful bass performance with the Zeppelin Pro. It can’t reach down to sub-bass levels, but what’s provided impresses for a speaker of its size (and shape).

A brief word on the Bluetooth performance. The sound quality is better over Wi-Fi than Bluetooth: more detail and clarity, punchier bass and more energy. The Bluetooth performance is not too shabby but does sound compressed. Wi-Fi offers the best experience.

Should you buy it?

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