Bowers and Wilkins Panorama home theater system

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By Ty Pendlebury, CNET.com.au
Oct 20, 2009

Though it's not as recognized for its design aesthetics as Bang & Olufsen, UK firm Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) has been churning out sophisticated speaker designs for years. At the pinnacle of this is the company's insane-looking Nautilus, but with products like the Zeppelin and CM speaker range, they are beautiful in their own right. When we first saw the Panorama at Las Vegas' Consumer Electronics Show in January, we must say we were a little underwhelmed at its unassuming appearance.

Unlike children, a sound bar is probably better heard and not seen, and so it should be rightly judged on how it sounds first. Is it any good?

Editors' note:

This review is based on evaluations conducted by our sister site CNET.com.au. Review ratings on similar products may differ due to differences in regional market trends and competing product lineups.

Design
Yes, it may look a little plain, but it's no less well-made. This is a solid piece of work with a metal cabinet seemingly borrowed from the XT-series speakers and a black grille. There is a red LED readout on the front, but this stays off most of the time. So what you'll usually see of the Panorama under your TV is a slab of black. The Panorama's grille hides nine separate woofers, including a dedicated center and the company's trademark Nautilus tweeter. At the rear of the unit is a Flowport bass port. The company claims the Panorama's low frequency response is deep enough as to not require a standalone subwoofer.

The unit comes with a pebble remote (which is used to control the main functions), and like the unit itself, is fairly spartan. While it's kind of cute, spending extra money on a universal remote is probably a good choice.

Features
Like Yamaha's Digital Sound Projectors, the Panorama is a sound bar that fires sound beams off your side walls to simulate surround effects. It does this with a series of angled drivers along the length of the unit, including a dedicated subwoofer and 1-inch tweeter. Technically, this is a 3.1 system as it includes a center channel as well.

Unlike its competitors in this price range, the selection of inputs and compatible file formats is fairly limited and won't be able to take full advantage of Blu-ray movies, for example. It lacks any sort of HDMI input and so won't decode DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD. However, it will decode Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, DTS and PCM stereo via its digital inputs. It comes with two optical, a single coaxial, and two stereo RCA sockets. We would have liked to see a 5.1 analog input, though. Lastly, while B&W claims you don't need one, there is also a provision for a subwoofer-out as well.

The Panorama is a "sound" bar only and lacks any video inputs or outputs, so all the adjustments are done via the small LED readout. Users can adjust the audio to suit what sort of surfaces or wall types you have (soft, medium and hard), distance from the unit to the listening position, and compensate for any lip sync problems.

If you're someone who likes to keep an eye on the environment as well as your hip pocket, you'll appreciate the Panorama's auto-on feature--the unit will switch on when it detects an incoming signal.