Bowers & Wilkins

Abbey Road's monitor of choice — and yours

When Abbey Road Studios needed monitors worthy of mixing the most important recordings in popular music, they didn't call a marketing department — they called John Bowers. Bowers & Wilkins has spent nearly six decades pursuing a singular obsession: the absolute elimination of everything between the listener and the music. The result is a loudspeaker company that engineers worship and audiophiles mortgage their homes for.

History

John Bowers was a peculiar man. A farmer's son from Worthing who'd served in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he came home with ruined hearing in one ear and an absolute fixation on making loudspeakers that could reproduce music with honesty. Not warmth, not sparkle, not any of the euphemisms manufacturers use when their products color the sound — honesty. In 1966, he and his business partner Roy Wilkins opened a small electronics shop in Worthing. Within two years, Bowers was building speakers in the back room that were better than anything the shop sold out front.

The early B&W monitors — the DM1 and DM70 — established the company's engineering-first philosophy. The DM70, with its electrostatic mid/high panel mated to a dynamic bass driver, was audacious for a tiny company operating out of a seaside town. But it was the P2H, a BBC-specification monitor, that caught the attention of the professional audio world. Bowers wasn't interested in making speakers that sounded impressive in a showroom. He wanted speakers that told the truth, even when the truth was ugly.

The 1979 introduction of the 801 changed everything. This was the speaker that landed B&W in Abbey Road Studios, and once Abbey Road adopted them, every other major studio started paying attention. The 801's distinctive shape — that bulbous head unit perched atop a separate bass enclosure — wasn't styling for its own sake. It was Bowers' solution to diffraction, the phenomenon where sound waves bend around cabinet edges and smear the image. By mounting the midrange and tweeter in a dedicated, curved enclosure, the 801 achieved a clarity that flat-baffle designs simply couldn't match.

The Matrix series, introduced in the mid-1980s, addressed the other great enemy of loudspeaker accuracy: cabinet resonance. B&W's Matrix bracing system — an internal honeycomb of interlocking panels — turned the cabinet walls from resonating surfaces into inert, dead structures. If you knock on a Matrix-series B&W cabinet, your knuckles hurt. That's the point. The 801 Matrix became the de facto reference monitor for classical recording, mastering, and any application where accuracy mattered more than flattery.

Then came the Nautilus in 1993, and the audio world lost its collective mind. Laurence Dickie's design looked like something HR Giger might have dreamed up — four exponentially tapered tubes spiraling out from a central point, each housing a single driver. There was no cabinet at all. The Nautilus eliminated box colorations not by dampening them but by removing the box entirely. Only 700 or so were ever built. If you've heard one properly set up, you understand why people describe it as a religious experience.

After John Bowers passed away in 1987, the company continued under the leadership of figures like Robert Trunz and Joe Atkins, eventually being acquired by Eva Automation in 2016 and then becoming part of Sound United (now Masimo Consumer). Through all of this, the Worthing engineering team has remained the heart of the operation, and the obsession with truth in reproduction has never wavered.

Notable Products

801 Matrix

The 801 Matrix is arguably the most important studio monitor ever built outside of a broadcast environment. When you see photographs of engineers at Abbey Road, Sterling Sound, or Skywalker Sound, those distinctive three-box towers in the background are almost certainly 801s. The design principle was radical in its simplicity: separate the bass, midrange, and treble into isolated enclosures so that the enormous energy from the bass driver can't contaminate the delicate work happening in the midrange. The Matrix internal bracing turned each enclosure into something approaching a solid block of material. Pair them with a serious amplifier — these speakers are ruthlessly revealing of upstream electronics — and the 801 Matrix delivers a window into the recording that remains competitive with monitors costing five times as much today.

Nautilus

There is no speaker on earth that looks like the Nautilus, and there is no speaker that sounds quite like it either. Laurence Dickie's masterwork solved the back-wave problem — the sound radiating from the rear of a driver cone — by loading each driver into a long, exponentially tapered transmission line that absorbs the back wave completely before it can reflect and interfere with the forward radiation. The result is four drivers operating in essentially free space. The imaging is hallucinatory. Instruments hang in the air with a three-dimensionality that conventional box speakers simply cannot achieve. At roughly 700 units produced and prices now well into five figures on the secondary market, the Nautilus is both a functional loudspeaker and a piece of industrial art.

Matrix 805

Not everyone has a room for 801s, and the Matrix 805 proved that B&W's engineering philosophy scaled down beautifully. This compact standmount monitor, with its Kevlar midrange/bass driver and metal dome tweeter, became the darling of small studios and serious home listeners who needed accuracy in a real-world room. The 805 lineage continues to this day, and every generation traces its DNA directly back to this original Matrix version. Find a clean pair, put them on proper stands, and you'll understand why people call B&W monitors "windows" rather than "speakers."

All Models in Archive (4)

Speakers

• 801 - 1979-1987
• 802 - 1979-1987
• DM6 - 1976-1979
• Matrix 801 - 1987-1998