Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air

The first Zeppelin paved the way for a glut of audiophile docking stations by introducing a flare of extravagance to the device, both in size and sound quality (not to mention price). Now the Zeppelin Air has taken the torch and updated the concept with the ever-useful AirPlay.

Design: Full Connectivity

While the visual style remains unchanged, this new generation of the Zeppelin has a number of new features, such as AirPlay and online capability. The stainless steel back has been replaced with a black plastic that has considerably reduced the weight of the speaker—but not the price.

Bowers & Wilkins has endowed its new docking station with Ethernet, composite, USB and mini-jack ports. Which should make the Zeppelin Air ready for just about any situation you throw at it. The only thing lacking might be Bluetooth for non-Apple products.

The Zeppelin Air may weigh less than the original, but it takes up just as much space. It's is still a large docking station, albeit a carefully designed one—with perhaps the exception of the iPhone dock (see inset). In any case, you'll definitely need to make room for this speaker that was made just as much to be seen as it was to be heard.

Extra kudos go to the remote control. Considering the price tag, you're in your right to demand a quality remote. This is something many brands seem to forget, as you often find nothing more than a "credit card" remote for an £800 product. B&W used the same egg-shaped, black lacquered-plastic remote as last time. Good call.

Audio

Just like the rest of the system, the DSP feeding the speakers has been revised and refined. And B&W says it perfected the drivers for a more homogeneous sound.

So here's what's inside: two tweeters in front, two mid-range drivers and a woofer in the centre. The volume has to be pretty loud (over 90 dB) before you start to hear any distortion. But the shame there is that they could have just set the maximum volume right under 90 dB and avoided the saturation altogether. But in practice you'll probably rarely end up reaching that level anyway.

The low-end is carefully restrained. Rather than leave the woofer to its own devices, B&W opted to keep it in check with the DSP. The result is clean rendering that has both power and impact, two factors that are often problematic in other docking stations. It might even be a good idea to use the iOS equaliser to adjust the bass for a more homogeneous and coherent response.

And likewise for the rest of the spectrum, the mids and highs are very well reproduced and depending on how you adjust the bass, with just a little experimentation you can obtain an excellent rendering.

But without a doubt the Zeppelin Air's strong point remains its spatial distribution. Thanks to its arched form, the speaker waters the vast majority of the listening space. You have to be at quite a wide angle before you hear any drop in the upper end of the spectrum or in the stereo rendering. That's quite the feat for a docking station, which, by definition, and build, is anti-stereo. Of course, it isn't the same quality and precision you'd get with a real stereo system, but hey, that's the nature of the product.

Even the likes of the Zeppelin Air couldn't elevate high-end docking stations into the realm of the hi-fi stereo system. There's always a grain of lunacy in the idea of someone investing huge sums of money in a product that will never reach the calibre of a full-fledged sound system, for the same price. But as iOS docks go, it offers high-quality, wide-ranging performance tucked into a finely-worked design. It's just a shame B&W held on to the awkward dock.