Bowers & Wilkins Panorama soundbar

Bowers & Wilkins’ new Panaorama soundbar brings the excitement of cinema-like sound to your living room. Easy to install and simple to connect to a whole range of home entertainment devices, Panorama will transform your flatscreen TV into a powerful home theatre system-enhancing its sound quality beyond what you imagined possible. The streamlined and stylish Panorama is a true one-box solution – even a subwoofer is optional.

The Panorama is the result of intensive research by B&W ís renowned engineering team at its UK Research and Development division in Steyning, West Sussex. It uses technologies originally developed for high-end speakers such as the legendary 800 Series (which famously reside in the control room of Skywalker Sound in California – one of the world’s most advanced movie production facilities in the world), and uses them to bring a new level of performance to soundbars.

Using a combination of multiple drive units and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) the Panorama not only boosts TV sound quality to unprecedented levels, it also provides users with an immersive surround performance from a single speaker. The wide sweet spot it creates allows more people to experience the effect together, making it the ideal family entertainment system.

In any surround sound system the vast majority of sound, even from the most effect-heavy movie soundtrack, is delivered through the centre speaker. B&W has worked hard to get this aspect of the Panorama spot on. Of the nine drive units housed within the Panorama’s aluminium casework, five are utilised in the active centre speaker: two bass woofers, two midrange drivers and an aluminium dome tweeter featuring B&Wís Nautilus Tube Loaded technology. The other four drive units provide the rest of the sound, and each one is located within its own enclosure to maintain a purity of performance. All the drive units are powered by six class D amplifiers, providing a combined power output of 175 Watts.

This combination means the Panorama is a true one-box solution. It provides more than enough bass output for the vast majority of living rooms, but if you have the system in a particularly large room, you can add a powered subwoofer such as Bowers & Wilkins’ award-winning PV1 for real room-shaking low frequencies.

Adding a Panorama to your TV does more than simply enhance your movie viewing. Computer games companies spend as much on surround sound tracks for the latest games as most Hollywood films, and the Panorama will enhance your gaming experience. It’s not just about surround sound though, as unlike other soundbars the Panorama is a highly impressive stereo speaker. Whether you are listening to music from television broadcasts, from an iPod or CD player, or even as part of a multi-room system, where the Panoramaís active design makes it an ideal partner, youíll be blown away by its output.

The purist, simple approach to design continues with connection and set up. Thereís no messing around with video cables; simply take digital coaxial or optical or even analog from your source component or television and let the Panorama work its magic. However, if you want to connect more to the Panorama than simply a Blu-ray player or DVD player you can, thanks to the inclusion of two optical digital inputs, one coaxial digital input and two stereo analog inputs.

Panorama is designed to partner a flatscreen TV, and offers flexibility when it comes to positioning. It can be placed on its own feet or attached to the wall using the supplied bracket for wall-mounted screens. However the Panorama is positioned, there can little doubt over its beauty. Stylishly crafted in the same manner as its sibling the Zeppelin, the Panorama mixes sleek black with a shining aluminium panel to produce the best looking soundbar on the market, and one that it is designed to complement the looks of the latest flatscreen televisions, not detract from them. It is designed to partner flatscreen televisions, from 37 inches upwards.