Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air: Oh Yeah, That is why We Were Occupied with AirPlay [Video]

The new Zeppelin Air is precisely like Lady Gaga-looks amazing, sounds wonderful, and includes upgraded electronic components . Also, it finally brings AirPlay’s potential awesomeness to fruition-tap a couple buttons and your room is full of beautiful wireless music.

I had a big gamble to check out the most recent AirPlay functionality-form of. The halls of CES are packed with a fog of competing wireless signals thicker than the second hand hooker smoke in Vegas’ casinos, so testing out a product grounded on Wi-Fi here isn’t exactly fair. I wasn’t ready to connect my iPhone 4 to B&W’s in-booth network a good way to force my own taste of music on everyone, but a rep’s iPad was working, so that had to suffice. I’m willing to provide B&W (and Apple) the advantage of the doubt and chalk it up to the hellish CES circumstance and not an AirPlay glitch, but we’ll must see when we can test the object out under real world (read: not convention center apocalyptic) conditions.

Caveats over! The item sounds incredible-and for good reason. It’s $600, yes, that is a hell of an awful lot for an iPod/iPhone dock. But B&W has bumped up the wattage to 150 (from 100 on its non-AirPlay predecessor), stuck in a new digital signal processor, and added two extra drivers. Even amid the cacophony of the convention center, Louis Armstrong sounded full and fabulous-music that sure as hell didn’t appear like it was coming from an ” iPod dock,” which at this point is something of a tech pejorative. It sounded huge. It was satisfying and surrounding. I’ll avoid audiophile buzzwords like ” rich” and ” bright,” and simply say that the audio produced by the Zeppelin Air is terrific, even when cranked your complete way up-in the midst of Las Vegas Convention Center. You could even call it rich-fine!

And it’s easy. It works rather like we’ve been wanting AirPlay to work. Connect with the network, select the Zeppelin, play your song. That’s it. There were a couple of seconds of lag between selection and playback, but if that’s the worst thing I will say concerning the AirPlay experience, consider me content. I need every speaker to be this much of a joy to beam music to.

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This post is tagged: digital signal processor, las vegas convention center, louis armstrong, vegas casinos, vegas convention center, wireless signals, wireless-music