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Allegiances among hi-fi enthusiasts can be as solid and partisan as they are for soccer or baseball fans. Some people pick a brand and stick with it through thick and thin, resisting all criticisms, refusing to concede any shortcomings. Once they’re in the camp, they’re not coming out.
We thought we’d try to cut through some of this energetic loyalty by making a comparative study of our own. We chose to set two very high profile, high quality hi-fi brands against each other and we picked Bowers and Wilkins, a company that was founded in the back of an electronics shop in an English seaside town back in 1966 and Bose, a US company founded two years earlier in Massachusetts.
Now, there are lots of features we could talk about, but we decided to concentrate on the single most important element which is sound quality. Yes, it’s true that design is very important. These are appliances that are going to contribute to the overall look of your home so you really don’t want something that looks cheap, ugly or out of place. Price is even more important than design, so it’s probably important that we get this one out of the way early. Bowers and Wilkins equipment is significantly more expensive than Bose products. Does that mean the sound quality is better, or simply that B&W’s material and production processes cost more? Let’s sample a few comments from enthusiasts to start with.
One user claims they can’t be compared: ‘B&W is a fantastic manufacturer of speakers, all of which blow Bose out of the water’. Another is more measured when he says it depends on which level of speaker from each brand you are comparing. Yet another dismisses Bose as being more about lifestyle than sound and even calls them ‘a poor man’s Bang & Olufsen’. Most also agree that B&W have better build quality. So it seems there’s a feeling amongst audiophiles that the question is settled. However, we decided to press ahead with our own testing, by trying out the nearest equivalents from the two manufacturers in a number of categories: over ear headphones, earbuds, soundbars, and wireless speakers. We’ll consider some of the more important functionalities as they relate to sound quality and look at a couple of key aspects, including the call quality when you’re using the headphones to make phone calls and the active noise cancellation features.
While the Bose model is a little more comfortable to wear with softer earpads and not such a tight fit, it has a slightly fiddly combination of buttons and touch controls, whereas the B&W sticks to buttons, which are generally more ergonomic and just a bit easier to use. You might expect a voice assistant facility to be standard in today’s headphones, but while the Bose 700 offers this, it’s absent from the Bowers Wikins PX7. In our experience, the voice assistant is more trouble than it’s worth, so we’re not marking B&W down for this.
Noise cancelling of all kinds of background noise is an essential feature of modern headphones and we felt that the Bose 700 might just have the edge over the Bowers Wilkins PX7, although it’s a very close thing and we can’t say for sure that it would hold true in the case of all kinds of background noise. Bose gives you 10 different active noise cancellation levels compared to B&W’s three. Frankly, we felt 10 is just too much choice and sometimes less is more.
As for battery life, there’s no contest. The Bose 700 manages about 20 hours while the B&W PX7 gives you 30. Either will see you through a long-haul flight from check-in to destination, but why settle for 20 hours when you can get 50% more? Both models support quick charging through a USB-C connection but if you’re looking for the best battery life from one charge, there’s a clear winner.
Before we turn to music, let’s see how they perform when making phone calls. It’s another close decision but on balance, we felt the call quality of the Bose 700 was marginally better, with slightly clearer sound and a more sensitive microphone. The difference is not significant and we don’t see it as a major issue.
The frequency response in low, middle and high ranges shows the real differences between the two. While both deliver very satisfying bass, the 700 seems more comfortable with lighter, acoustic music, while the PX7 has the warmth and depth to shine when playing rock, funk, reggae, soul and electronic music. George Clinton and Bootsy Collins definitely need the B&W treatment.
B&W make a better all-round job of the middle frequencies, while Bose tends to favor the upper-mids, particularly the vocals. We’d have to give it to B&W on this one.
In the high frequencies, while the Bose 700 may give you a certain sparkle, with cleaner and lighter vocals, the sound from the PX7 is thicker and more velvety, which we found to be much more direct and authentic. In general, we’d make Bowers & Wilkins the winners in this category. They have very good build quality, a pleasing lack of touch controls, balanced frequency response, perfectly acceptable noise cancelling capacity for all but the most extreme background noise and good sound quality.
The B&W Formation Bar is a premium soundbar which has a really smart contemporary design. Cylindrical rather than a rectangle, it has very nice detail on the endcaps and you can also upgrade it easily by adding a Formation Bass, which is the matching subwoofer, and satellite speakers. It doesn’t come with a remote control so you’ll need to download the Formation App to your smartphone. It’s available for both iOS and Android operating systems. It also lacks HDMI connections nor does it support lossless audio formats like DTS:X and Dolby Atmos, although it does, of course, handle Dolby Digital.
The sound quality is fairly neutral with a slightly muddy bass performance and a fairly bright treble. When you’re listening to bass-heavy music or watching a movie with a hefty soundtrack, you might feel a little short-changed.
In all honesty, we felt that the Bose Smart Soundbar 700 has the edge over the Formation Bar. It seems better built with an impressive soundstage and strong center channel performance. It also supports DTS, features an HDMI ARC port and has more options for sound enhancement. Bowers & Wilkins is relatively new to the soundbar field, so we expect that they will deal with these shortcomings when they come to upgrade it but for now, we’d say Bose comes out on top.
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