Digital Trends

Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin November 8th, 2007 | by Marshal Rosenthal

Features and Design

There's no denying that the Zeppelin’s shape draws attention, and the fact that it’s made of steel and has a heft of 16 lbs. shows that there’s some serious weight being thrown around inside. The back sports two bass ports, along with a dual audio input handling both analog and digital sources, and both S-Video and composite out options for video. There’s also a USB port designed for updates and the power plug. 

A rubberized bottom pad that places the device at about a 40-degree angle dictates the way the Zeppelin stands. This is good for when the unit is located below ear level, such as on a desk or countertop. An ex-tra pad is further provided to make the Zeppelin face more straightforwardly - it has inserts to keep it in place.

On the front sits a docking bar that runs up the center, between the two sides, and holds the iPod in place through a clever bit of friction engineering that alleviates the need for different inserts. You simply press forward on the dock to move it out and then insert the connector and release so that the iPod lies against a backing plate. But because of the docking bar’s placement, it seems to shout out to be gripped when you want to pick the Zeppelin up. However this should never be done as it could easily damage the dock. (I had to pull my hand back from doing this on more than one occasion) – the proper way to grip the unit is by holding both sides.)

The dock works with all Nanos, the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPod with color display, iPod with video and the Mini and iPod Classic. There’s full functionality with 5G iPods as well, but it’s limited with the 3G/4G models (and Mini). For example, the Zep doesn’t charge 3G iPods while they’re in use and the same happened when I tried attaching my first generation Nano.

Controls ride along at the top of the dock’s strip and are incredibly unobtrusive, consisting of a +/- volume bar and a power button that also chooses sources (connecting an iPod chooses it automatically).

We get the idea of continuing the design theme, which is why the remote is black and steel-backed. But honestly, we can’t really say anything good about the egg-like shape. Besides tiny buttons and even tinier text, you can’t quickly tell which end is up, and it’s not comfortable to hold for a long time. The remote doesn’t let you control every aspect of the iPod either. It lets you play/pause and “move” through songs, but you can’t select playlists or artists from it and so have to do the initial selection on the iPod itself. Nonetheless, the infrared beam works well despite the small area at the front of the remote where the emitter is located. 

Image Courtesy of B&W

What’s Inside?

A look “under the hood” has to be mostly done via imagination, since we can’t really rip the Zeppelin apart for an intimate and invasive look and B&W deliberately makes it tough to remove the grills. But if we had X-ray vision, what we’d see would be left and right channel midrange cones and a tweeter at each end, plus a Bass driver in the middle and an infrared receiver and multi-color LED. B&W says that the system’s elliptical shape isn’t just to attract attention, but is specifically designed to greater focus the music by nar-rowing at the sides where the tweeters are found. These tweeters are the same Nautilus type that you’d find in B&W’s superlative 800 reference speaker range, by the way.

Image Courtesy of B&W