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Home / News / Bowers & Wilkins’ new Zeppelin flies again with Alexa plus plenty of streaming tech

Bowers & Wilkins’ new Zeppelin flies again with Alexa plus plenty of streaming tech

Airship-inspired speaker is in the air once again

There’s a new Zeppelin in town – yes, the airship-inspired Bowers & Wilkins classic has been revamped significantly inside the instantly recognisable frame. It’s available for £699 in both light and dark finishes; midnight grey and pearl grey officially. 

The Zeppelin now has Amazon Alexa on board (though it’s not able to work with Google Assistant) and will be able to be used in a multi-room setup through an upcoming software update. As you’d expect there’s support for Bluetooth (using Qualcomm’s latest-gen aptX Adaptive) as well as Apple’s AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect, too, just as with the older Zeppelin. The Bowers & Wilkins Music app also gives you acess to other services like Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, Soundcloud and TuneIn.

Sophisticated one-box

Sophisticated one-box

Bowers & Wilkins has given it a 240W amplifier to power the two independent left and right speaker assemblies. The decoupled double-dome tweeters are fully isolated and are paired with 90mm drivers alongside a 150mm subwoofer. The enclosure is very rigid in order to reduce any chance of vibration and so deliver top acoustic performance.

There’s now ambient lighting in the base so the underside of the device can be lit; though you can control how keen you are on having this.

The Zeppelin was first introduced in 2007 and was originally envisaged as an iPod speaker with a old-style 30 pin dock but of course the nature of all-in-one speakers like this has changed significantly and it’s now a streaming device.

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home