Bowers & Wilkins Formation
The Formation suite of wireless multiroom audio brings B&W’s strengths in traditional loudspeaker design and engineering into line with the 21st-century multiroom concept, with six products which you could use individually or join together in a home connected via the Formation proprietary mesh wireless network, able to stream up to high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz audio.
The company has long been a leader in lifestyle audio through its Zeppelin active speakers and a few other more conventional designs, but it has been a long wait for it to join the multiroom party. Many have been surprised how simplistic is the ‘Home’ app which controls the products — it does little more than group them and control their volume, plus a little EQ control. But the company must have taken this to heart, as it has since announced that an ‘enhanced’ Home app is on the way, increasing its abilities and allowing Formation devices to access more content directly.
With that news and the app’s relative simplicity anyway, we’ll omit our ‘app’ analysis for this section of our multiroom round-up, and we’ll focus on the products instead. Because while the Formation series is certainly at the upper end of the multiroom market in terms of price, they’re also high up
