Bowers & Wilkins A7 AirPlay Wireless Music System

Reviews for Bowers & Wilkins A7 AirPlay Wireless Music System

Customer Reviews and Ratings

4.0 out of 5 stars

Based on 30 reviews

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Maybe I expected too much.

    • Written by from Chesterfield

    28 of 30 people found this useful

    I will start by saying I'm certainly not an audiophile and don't have "golden" ears but I do know what I like. The A7 sounds like what it is, a small all in one shelf unit and possibly the best all in one shelf unit on the market. The only problem is in this segment you could probably find several speakers costing half as much that sound virtually the same to most ears.
    Airplay is another achilles heel with the A7 as others have noted. I have 2 airport extremes blanketing the house with wifi and you could be certain every 45 minutes to an hour the airplay would cut out with the A7 for a couple seconds or more. Have several Apple TV's that I havent had any trouble with using airplay so I cant help but blame the weak G wifi card in the A7. Overall probably better solutions out there for an airplay speaker.

    Was this useful? Maybe I expected too much.

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    great speaker for the size but not the price

    • Written by from San Diego

    18 of 28 people found this useful

    it's a nice speaker if you have a limited space. the sound is very good (mine sounded so so at first, but did get much better after a few days of breaking in). the base is good for a small speaker, but it does not sound like a big system like bose sounddock 10 does when you turn the volumn up. it's fuller sound than bose at low to mid volume. the airplay sometimes drops if there is any interference such as when my microwave is on.
    it's a great speaker, but for the price i expected better.

    Was this useful? great speaker for the size but not the price

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Bass is way too strong

    • Written by from Tomigusuku

    13 of 25 people found this useful

    The overall sound quality is excellent, however the bass is too strong to be labelled as a "natural sounding speaker". Unlike the Zeppelin Air there is no setting to change the bass level at the DSP processing side.

    Although this is not a knock on the product itself, I was unaware that Airplay is woefully inadequate for anything except iTunes playback. If you try to use as a high-quality speaker for iOS apps, for example, you either get silence or the playback is delayed heavily. In other words, useless for anything EXCEPT music playback.

    It's very good for what it does, although for something at this price I was expecting something a little more balanced.

    Was this useful? Bass is way too strong

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Great sound lousy streaming.

    • Written by from Mckinney

    8 of 16 people found this useful

    Let me get down to the nuts and bolts of Things. Setting up the Airplay requires that you download an app and it takes at least 5 minutes or more to sync. The B&W sounds great but the Airplay does not have good range and will only steam music around 40 feet away without skipping and lagging. For $857 is should both sound good and stream music reliably. It seems B&W spent all there efforts on the acoustics side and very little time on the Airplay side. For a device that is designed to be portable and wireless I consider this a failure. You may be asking yourself maybe his wifi is not efficient enough to stream past 40 feet? My wifi has no trouble streaming music to my iPads, iPhones anywhere in my house or to my play stations that are at an equal distance as the A7 was or to my Apple TV and Samsung DA E750 which is located in the same location as the A7 used to be.

    Was this useful? Great sound lousy streaming.

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