PREMIUM SOUND BY BOWERS & WILKINS : FINAL VERDICT

VOLVO NEW XC60 LAUNCH : As mornings go, it was a good one. I got this Email from Volvo Car UK. It was from a colleague of Ben, the executive fellow who set up my Volvo press loans of the XC90 SUV and then the V90 XC estate, both with B&W audio. I DO like him
And the Email was inviting me to the launch of their new Scaleable Product Architecture car, the Volvo XC60. I was chuffed rotten, if completely green at these things. I had NO idea what the purpose of the questionnaire they sent me was. Asking after my musical tastes and favourite dessert and snack. Now as far as writers utterly devoted not just to Volvo but the XC series goes, as well as the particular brand of audio involved, I’m a bizarrely biased yet good fit. For one, I now have 40,000+ miles driven in my own lovely 329bhp T6 Polestar XC70 that I drove to the launch with the seats flat and a serious fatboy glamping set-up packed in the bed for my subsequent weekend away and secondly, I use B&W 800 series speakers as the resident reference set in my home theatre reviews set up and know them well enough at B&W to have been able to do my first interview about the sound, inside the XC90, with the B&W PR chap, plus the engineer who helped configure the system, outside their research centre in Steyning.
XC90 Video, watch later if you like.. the new one is embedded below. This is to save you going to look

 

Perhaps that makes me the scariest reviewer of all?
The whole experience of the launch was laid back but tremendously elegant in approach. The beautiful Oddfellows hotel (‘˜luxury’, ‘˜boutique’ were the adjectives) was not long opened, yet they had tempted the folks at Volvo Car UK for their corporate gig with a delicious location with the right parking to show off a fleet of cars and yet allow the visiting press to park their own cars nearby, a superb kitchen and staff that’d peel you a grape if your whim so dictated. All that and a lovely state of the art bedroom each, from a limitless needle/drench shower that could skin you alive, to a panoply of minibar comestibles and libations that even included a bag of Haribo, had that been your thing. If it were a tent, the bed was so big, they would call it a ‘˜six-man’.
The most startling thing, when I eventually reached my room to find my luggage taken there by one of the PR team, (I was so uncomfortable with that, having been a human forklift/roadie to get into live sound many years ago. I limp like a pirate but could still have carried my luggage upstairs.) was to find the TV burst into life as I went through the door, with a Volvo XC60 promotional video running. Also, a bar of chocolate and some kettle crisps on the pillow, under a lovely welcome note with my name upon it. I didn’t really twig what the bit about favourite snack was then as I sat, happy and Buddha-like, frankly, in just pants and socks, pre-shower, there was a polite knock at the door. I think ALL sorts of of ‘˜OhMiGerrrd!’ thoughts, I leaned around the door so as not to scare the nice lady with my moobs and she said, ‘Your snack!’ I looked at her with all the intelligence of a sloth with a bad hangover and said, ‘OHah! Thanks!’, ‘Of course, you have read your welcome letter?’
Taking what was slightly mystifyingly, a side plate of smoked fish fillet from the smartly-attired lady with a grin, I withdrew and looked at my welcome letter
I think I had said, ‘anything moving slowly enough to catch’ as a facetious answer to my favourite snack..but on reflection, something about smoked fish
I ate the lot.

OK, so Rayner was a bit whelmed at the whole corporate car launch thing and while we were told to arrive from 11:15am for our presentation and then test drives, I was so excited the night before that I awoke at silly O’clock and leaped into my laden car to arrive in Cheadle by nine on the Thursday morning. Ben, the fellow referred to at the top, was up and breakfast-hosting the departing guests. I honestly didn’t realise that Volvo had hired the ENTIRE hotel and had intended to stay incognito until I had had my own breakfast. But I was greeted warmly and despite it being at the very hour they stopped breakfast on these corporate days, they happily fed me. I was still gently burping toast as I was presented with the 190bhp D4 car to drive before coming back for the presentation. Said presentation had some of the most awesome 4K graphics on huge Samsung panels, it was brilliant.

The same D4 engine in the V90 and XC90 are of course dealing with a lot more metal, so the mid size XC60 absolutely loves the 190 horses of the D4 Inscription Pro I tried. It is a twin sequential turbo 2.0L diesel and like my 2.9L petrol one, they are made so the low-revs smaller turbo spools up faster to get you under way the sooner. In the D5, there is a cunning genuine air compressor system built in, tank and all, to take that concept further and faster. Called PowerPulse, the tank ‘˜puffs’ that first turbo into rapid life and helps offer power to 235bhp. I was keenest on the cars with B&W sound systems behind their SENSUS navigation/infotainment technology and the bonkers Inscription Pro seating. So as well as the D4, I had a go on the 254bhp T5 model as well. It being someone else’s car, I was awfully careful but I admit I am NEVER cool when driving a press car, with a knot of professional fretting in my gut as it needs to go back utterly unmarked, to keep your reputation as equally unsullied.
Hilariously, in this case, each returning test drive was met with a pit crew of Volvo Car UK team blokes, all senior types who look like they were all once involved in the motor industry and now work on the fleet side. The PR team were comprised more women, complete with a slightly astonished junior Uni student intern, who clearly was still pinching herself for getting such a cool internship. But that reception crew was clearly looking at the car with total detail.. I passed!
OK, so here is my video about the whole thing (although I didn’t Vlog the event complete to me in pants eating fish – I have ‘˜painted pictures in your head’ that you already didn’t want – pure radio in print online.)

So I am a ‘˜motoring journalist’ and you will catch me as a soi-disant pundit on BBC Wales, Scotland and R5Live as well as local to me, sometimes but you know what? My opinions upon the Volvo XC60 as product and how it drives are one thing, as valid as anyone’s but when it comes to car audio, so help me, I am now old enough and experienced enough (and been called ‘˜ledge’ enough by young men with baseball caps who once read me in Max Power when they were twelve) in both the extreme top end of both car and hifi loudspeaker technology to have some actual authority.

Like a letter I wrote to a car audio magazine, two decades ago, ‘the opinion of someone who’s opinion you can respect’. I then became a reviewer, joining the family scam of selling words in a row, even if my mum couldn’t grasp all the words.
Without boring on longer, it is just that I hope a proportion of readers of this will not know me from Adam, (C’MON, I am allowed that) and you need to know it’s the Jezza Clarkson of Car Audio, the one who Home Cinema Choice always described as being ‘˜The UK’s expert in extreme audio..’ as I had told them about the decibel dragster nutters in my life, who writes for you now. (But without any misogyny nor racism.)
So I am not going to write a treatise upon my drives, except to agree with Volvo who reckon these cars are going to sell on their own merits, in vast numbers. But I am going to give a full-on HiFi reviewers’ verdict on the Premium Sound by Bowers & Wilkins and its integration with the car.

The system has a few less loudspeakers in it versus the bigger XC90 and longer S90/V90 monocoques and subsequently has five hundred less English pounds in the asking price as an option. That still means ONE THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED Watts and fifteen speakers. You have to write it shouty, them’s the rules!

These systems have a ten inch carbon fibre ‘˜FreshAir’ woofer of incredible cunning, which you can read about here. link And only lacks a pair of two-way sets in the very back versus the S90/V90/XC90 set up, which takes their systems’ speaker-counts to nineteen.
And here’s some serious geekery. In the front you get a tweeter and midbass speaker facing you, front and centre. This High Frequency (HF) unit is a Nautilus„¢ tweeter, in a tube that represents nearly fifty years of developmental history in acoustic design. The taper inside is the clever bit that removes back reflections on the tweeter dome inside the actual drive unit. This means, along with the essential direct line-of-sight as against reflected audio signal path to your ears, that the splash of a cymbal or the fingernails on acoustic guitar strings, will make your goosebumps get goosebumps. It is true five star audio stuff – and that is with a special alloy dome, not their mad vapour-deposited Diamond dome diaphragms. You would break those in a car!
Then, the 100mm midbass drivers are seen better in the video than in real life and show yellow through the grilles. This is special stuff again in that it is Kevlar and B&W are the single most expert in use of this material to make the fastest, sweetest, least ‘˜coloured’ speaker transducers around. As seen on these!

In the dash location, that centre channel is all about its part in the deep cunning DSP or digital signal processing going on on the cabin. With the supreme luxury of knowing all about the interior the system has to work with, the audio designers can apply exact Time Alignment settings to each speaker, to allow for the different settings of the system from driver-utter-selfish, to shared with the passengers the better, or even an allele of the famously wondrous-of-acoustics Gothenburg Concert Hall. In air, sound does about a millisecond a foot in old money. If sounds arrive at your ears at the same time, you perceive them to be in front of you. We hear more than most people know but you can be conned with good technology. This means that in full driver-centric mode, you will hear deep rich sound fields, in living stereo that seem not to be coming out of the speakers but are rather hanging in space, even oddly, seemingly beyond the confines of the cabin.
You need power and a few places for sound to be coming from, for this to work and you need to divide up the frequencies so that a big speaker does meaty stuff, a medium one does the middle bit where we have most of the voices and the Nautilus„¢ tweeters do the highs. Here’s another cool fact about this system. While the Tweeter-On-Top technology of the dash speaker has a tube behind it, in the doors, each of the four tweeters has the same tube but coiled up to fit inside, a bit like the main driver of the Nautilus„¢ speaker itself.

Each door also has a 100mm Kevlar midrange unit and a 170mm long throw bass unit. But it is the ‘˜Fresh Air’ subwoofer that makes the difference. All 250mm of carbon Fibre goodness, hidden away in a skinny box. If you didn’t wade through the whole linked article about it, the unit is licensed in Europe to Alpine by an Australian company and Alpine sell it to their OEM customers and ‘˜got in bed’ with Volvo and B&W. My article says:
‘Basically, it’s a bandpass box actually mounted to be within the monocoque of the car, using the bodywork as an infinite baffle. Inside the box is a single transducer. In the XC60, it is a ten inch carbon fibre job. Both rear and front chamber are ported. The rear chamber is ported to the outside world, or into yes, fresh air! The front ports into the car and allows the lows to flow. And my word, they do. Thing is, it is way more than the not-simple-at-all bandpass enclosures that you may be used to understanding within aftermarket car audio. For one, the designer has a curve, the cabin gain, that is utterly fixed, to design that woofer response with. As against in a room, where meeting the acoustics is a bigger issue as that varies so much with each application.’

If that was all a bit technical, let me put it into how well it sounds
The Premium Sound by Bowers and Wilkins sound system in the XC60, at £2,500 is an absolute steal versus wanting to get a result as clear and clean with aftermarket kit. Those days are now fading, with mostly the hardcore hobbyist motorist in vehicles that are not their daily drives, who do that stuff. The sound quality is absolutely five stars.
The tonal balance is excellent, without any audiophile-insulting EQ changes with volume. The system has a huge frequency passband, meaning it goes from rare tinkly highs to serious scary deep fear-register lows with more ease then most all OEM systems out there. Dynamics are fast and snappy as the system can go louder suddenly when asked, without any congestion or distortion. This results in superb clarity, massive intelligibility and plenty of raw power for most people. The bass is just improbably good, but super-keen listeners will feel the very bottom octave lose power when you make an acoustic short-circuit by opening the window. This system is not for playing to other people, windows down. It sounds most on song with them shut. The difference is between brilliant and awesome, mind you, so most will just turn it up a bit when their windows are open.

And now, my own slice of not really very controversial opinion. First, if you are in the car alone, set it to Individual Stage and tweak the sliders with the graphics to adjust the ‘˜intensity’ and ‘˜envelopment controls until they are sounding good to your own selfish urge. ‘˜Studio’ is good for sharing but the Concert Hall is not where I listen to rock and pop. I gather Ben listened to an entire classical work in an XC60 he was driving, on the Gothenburg setting and loved it. As a sound engineer I am not a fan myself but you might end up using it a lot on Classic radio.
I had again been facetious and silly in my music choices questionnaire, as I always like to see what the system’s most knowledgeable people want to show it off with and I can still tell. As after all, unless it is new or obscure-to-UK music, I may be familiar with it. I have heard a lot in my years. I had had a Spotify playlist made and fired up just for me, which was pretty cool.

And the controversial bit is that Bowers reckon their best system is the £3,000 one in the bigger cabined car. However, that immediacy of the midpower, the direct-to-your-ears path lengths of those fabulously posh tweeters and the sheer proximity to you of the four woofers, (because all the distances are smaller in the mid size car) plus finally that Fresh Air infinite baffle monocoque-mounted sub-bass system, all combine to make this one of the most emotionally intense audio experiences around. It’s real HiFi in a car.
One or two of the tracks were massively dynamic and were rock crescendoes in places. I actually got that rock ‘n roll face with wide open gob, going ‘˜Yarrrrrrr’ inaudibly as I raised my voice, happily rocking up the grades effortlessly, turbos swapping jobs with each bend as I pressed on up to the high peaks on 254bhp of sweet Volvo urge in the T5.

It was about then, I had the guilt attacks I even commented about it in the video.
The XC60 is a tour de force.. the B&W audio option is breath taking and I have not even TOUCHED on Volvo’s biggest story of the future of driver assistance and autonomous driving and the seriously leading edge safety technology on that car. I think that actually deserves its own coverage and with luck, I may be able to get that done in future as I live quite close to their HQ. But for now, this was about B&W for me.
Think about it. Do you have a music system at home? How much time do you get to listen to it? How long do you drive each day? I assure you that the £2.5k, while a fat slice of cash, represents almost offensive levels of value for money for the sheer top end 5 star quality and potency you get.

And I want Inscription Pro ventilated massage seats with leg length adjustable seat cushions and powered positioning, so bad I can taste it.