The New VOLVO V90XC with BOWERS & WILKINS Audio
Have you ever re-read something you liked? Well, I am never sure how many folks see my stuff or even if they are the same readers each timebut even if you are a regular reader, I am about to self-plagiarise my own work to some degree. This is because I poured my Volvo history and very soul into this piece and it was October 2016, so I figure 98% of you wouldn’t have recalled it in any case and so I can revisit a tad First, my involvement with the brand, personally.
I love Volvo cars, so I am biased as hell – about the cars. I have driven a 340 GL 1.4, a 340 GL 1.7, a 360 GLT 2.0, a 740 2.3 turbo, a 940 2.3 turbo and now I have a 40k miles XC70 4×4 with a 2.9 petrol engine, two turbos and Polestar loony-Swede engine remapping. I have got over half a million Volvo miles trundled in total and I am finally no longer in fear of my 329bhp monster. (It has taken me 40K to do that!) I can tell you that Volvo have ALWAYS cared about audio, even legendarily fitting a make of speakers into their cars that the trade talked about and hated because they ‘˜were too good for OEM’. The ones in my 940 were offensively good and played head units from Pioneer, Parrot and Kenwood through the years and 275,000 miles, still working well when I scrapped the old girl.
I miss her yet (‘You CAN’T fall in love with a car, Sir!’) Larry at Darryl’s motors, Croxley – the BIZZ garage in Herts, for owners of older Volvos.
In the Eighties, I used to drive to the Costa Brava in the 1.4 340GL to go to Camping El Maset. A hillside site with tiny terraced plots under trees in a Catalan village called Begur. I had two pairs of six by nines and a woofer in the parcel shelf and so much luggage crammed into the car, that I could barely see out the back. (I NEEDED to keep the boot cubic free- for bass.) When I got to Palamos in the evenings to cruise the tourist streets, windows down and music pumping, it was not the bar owners but I that were the winners in the attention stakes. One had a black whale tail RS Sierra Cosworth parked out the front of his ebony-themed bar, one had a white one outside his chrome and white establishment. The punters looked up from al fresco tables in amazement as I cruised past and crushed the bar’s sound systems.
It was slow by comparison to modern cars but I had a ball. A loud one.
When I had my 740 audio system installed by Audio Hero Paul Richardson (lucky stiff, for ever grateful) I was granted a bonkers MONTH-LONG loan of a 960 3.0 GLE saloon by the folks at Volvo Car UK. This was while mine was destined to go in Max Power magazine (of which I was ICE editor) and the saloon got a mention. An in-line six-cylinder petrol block, it didn’t half GO! That system was very crisp indeed.
NOW, more recently, I have had a proper go on the new XC90 SUV with the new automotive B&W kit in it. I was able to kick a question upstairs at Volvo Cars in Sweden, thanks to Ben in the UK corporate office, to ask for some ‘˜whyfore’ from the higher ups and got a word from Henrik Svensson, Audio Systems Manager at Volvo Cars who said, ‘We wanted to raise the feeling of luxury and exclusiveness in Volvo’s cars, and saw Bowers & Wilkins as a perfect partner with its strong heritage in high-end audio. As well as the sound quality a vital contributor to the luxury experience in a car we also felt that certain design elements from Bowers & Wilkins, for example the acoustically precise central tweeter, were a good fit for our interiors. Bowers & Wilkins’ philosophy when it comes to sound that it should be a pure listening experience reflects Volvo’s human-centric approach.’ I really liked that!
But a new kid again is on the block and it is the estate car once more to the fore. The all-new V90 has won Estate Car Of The Year. The one nowadays prefixed simply V for versatile and the 4×4 version of this bigger V90 car is called the V90XC for Cross Country. Although the badge on the back has a small ‘˜AWD’ plaque next to the engine badge. (I had the D4, a 2.0L. The D5 is the same two litre diesel but has more power-adding technology to raise it from 189bhp to over 200.) Each generation of these has become less off-road-looking and the V90XC only really has the ‘˜Cross Country’ branding visible as a indented lettering to the rear bumper.
With the V90XC, when you order yours, you can again tick a box that says ‘B&W speaker system’. I have been a reviewer of high end home theatre speakers for a long time and have great relationships about the speaker industry in the UK, including Bowers & Wilkins. Such that regular readers may know that tests of audiophile car audio source units for Talk Audio have been listened to on a set of B&W LM1 ‘˜Leisure Monitors’, presented to me when I went to the press event they held when their first automotive system went into the Jaguar XF.
Also, I have visited their factory to hear these
‚¬65,000 a pair.
So I have a handle on quality car audio, B&W’s product and how they make it, as well as a working knowledge of the Volvo product. My worlds looked to be colliding all over again with this car. So it was time to call up Volvo Car UK and Bowers’ PR folks and ask nicely..once more!
Thus, here, upstream of the stuff about the XC90 and the technology of the audio equipment as it pertains to the system, is my video all about the Volvo V90 Cross Country. (Easy to confuse with the XC90 SUV!)
The bass was deeper and richer in this bigger estate car, versus the SUV model. I guess the transfer function of the longer cabin was more favourable for the heavy duty-clever OEM FRESH AIR subwoofer.
Here is the video for the XC90 SUV for comparison.
The tweeters on all B&W systems in Volvos are all equipped with the Nautilus technology back-wave absorption, tapered tube, so uniquely a B&W thing. All are one inch – 25mm in diameter. On the dash top, amidst the sexy Bowers & Wilkins laser-engraved speaker panels, with holes and dots lined up so you kind of get the perforations somehow fade as you reach the panel’s edge, that tweeter is a straight tube and looks thus for all the world like the top of a B&W 802.
Those are only £11,000 a pair but do have vapour-deposited DIAMOND tweeter diaphragms. Yes, for B&W, ‘Diamond’ is not a model line name for vanity.
But that doesn’t impress me. I know that works. What still gave me Techbumps„¢ (goosebumps caused by technology) was that Bowers & Wilkins have remade the wheel and curled their Nautilus Tube tech up behind a car tweeter! I have not seen the thing uninstalled. I wanted to claw the panel apart with my damn teeth if need be, I was so keen to see its butt – but you still don’t do that to press cars.
The mids are all Kevlar, a material that is as B&W as the seaside. These are four inch, or 100mm in the front soundstage, that is doors and centre, while the rear doors and high-roof surround speaker installations have smaller three inch or 80mm Kevlar mid-drivers. Each set of mid and tweet has an amp channel and the four midwoofers and carbon fibre ‘˜Fresh Air’ woofer in the bodywork each get their own channel of power from multiple channels of efficient Class D amp power, hidden away in the guts of the car.
Oddly B&W and Volvo alike feel that this system sings best in the XC90 4×4. Whereas I feel that the new estate version V90 – like the one I had – has a longer cabin, so enables a slightly longer fundamental frequency to be propagated for better bass extension.
You may not remember how revolutionary the bass driver in this system is, nor the political amusement it caused me.
For the the last and most amazing thing for me, was the collision of espionage over years and top PR help. For the PR folks from HARMAN, who have a lot to do with the electronics in the car, (after all, B&W do not make amplifiers) have been able to connect me to a very high tier OEM supplier. I refer to that Fresh Air subwoofer in the car.
Bowers know how to make bass. Link, yes, that’d be me, by the way. But not in cars, as you cannot put a 44kg, 97lb woofer in the boot. And Volvo and Harman and B&W all meet up at a woofer, provided by Alpine in the UK as a supplier to manufacturers, that was in turn licensed from an Australian company.
I admit that I have been sat on the knowledge of the existence of this device since I spotted some in a heap at Alpine HQ, obviously OEM items. I asked nicely and was told it was ‘˜Non Disclosure Agreement’ (NDA) stuff, so I refrained rather than upset Alpine. But I was told about the woofer on camera and you can see my face go OOOH!
I was given the chance to talk to the folks Down Under to get the skinny on this woofer but had been a bit shattered super-late at night and there’s a fat nine hour time difference. It had started to delay the feature. I did get that interview but I thought it best, so as not to ungruntle any of the stalwart companies that have been part of making this superb offering as a factory option, that I wrote about it separately. You can find that article here: Link
What it does is provide a bottom octave of sub-bass and some true meat for big bits that really impresses you and makes you aware that there is over a kilowatt of muscle in the system. It keeps the realism and scale of music and thus outperforms most every other high end OEM system I have experienced before. And I have heard Ferraris, MacLarens, Lamborghinis, Lexuses, (Hobittses?) Bentleys, Rollers and Audis. And the V90 is the daddy of them all. I literally hung my jaw in amazement at times, at the sheer wobble-ripple of accurate low end in this latest test car!
I can re-iterate that the sound of the B&W speaker option in the V90XC is also worth every single penny and once more, if you can afford it, this will make the eventual resale of your car as easy as falling off a log.
I would like huge thank you to Ben Foulds at Volvo Car UK for organising this for me.