Bowers & Wilkins and Abbey Road in Volvo EX90 Review

As well as designing the first three-point seatbelt, which was then gifted to all car makers to improve global safety, Volvo was among the first to fit its cars with high-quality factory sound systems. Less widely known is that it sourced speakers from Dynaudio, a high-end special hi-fi speaker manufacturer.

These days, the Swedish company’s basic audio offering is from Bose, with a trifling fourteen speaker locations, driven by seventeen amplifier channels. But the premium option comes from Bowers & Wilkins, which is, of course, famous for its reference-grade domestic and studio loudspeakers. Lest we forget, this company has supplied its finest products for use in the control rooms of legendary recording studios such as Abbey Road.

Recording studios usually have three sets of loudspeakers for sound engineers and producers to hear what they are constructing. The first is a massive built-in monitor system, often with two fifteen-inch drivers per channel and from two to five enclosures depending upon use. Stereo is used for most music, with five channels (or more) for mixing movies.

Then there’s a pair of speakers designed to imitate normal, cheap systems found in standard homes. These days, that’s about smart speakers, which have got better thanks to improvements in small transducer design. The originals, sat on the mixing desk top, were meant to impersonate a hand-held transistor radio. If the mix sounded okay on them, then it was expected to work on Medium Wave radio. Finally, a set of hi-fi speakers would share space on the mixing desk top. These were called near-field monitors, and again, it was about reproducibility rather than abstract excellence. The iconic BBC LS3/5A was widely used for this role back in the day.

In 1980, Abbey Road Studios first began using Bowers & Wilkins’ big floorstanding 801s in many control rooms. This has continued ever since, although they have obviously been upgraded over time. And now, top model Volvo cars have a new sound mode available, which was downloaded to cars over the air earlier this year. It is called Abbey Road Studios Mode. StereoNET pulled in a shiny new EX90 to audition, and it was tested and photographed at B&W’s nerve centre in the British seaside town of Worthing.

Up Close

The B&W system fitted in the Volvo EX90 comprises 3-way components in each corner, with a 2-way centre channel, single subwoofer and rear surrounds, plus four height speakers in the headlining and two drivers in each front headrest for front seat detail enhancement. That’s twenty-five speakers, which run on a 1,610W multichannel amplifier with potent digital signal processing.

Starting at the bottom, there’s a 250mm loaded paper-coned B&W FreshAir subwoofer, vented to the outside world in a dual ported bandpass enclosure, plus a 170mm woofer in each door. Each rear door has an 80mm B&W Continuum woven composite fibre-coned midrange unit, while the front doors have 100mm Continuum coned mids. The 80mm midband driver is also used as paired rear surrounds and in the centre channel. Each 40mm driver is an aluminium-coned unit in both the height speakers and paired headrest applications.

There are five Nautilus Double-Dome tweeters, one per door and one in the centre. This last tweeter gives rise to the ‘tweeter-on-top’ description, as it is mounted at ninety degrees to give direct radiation to your ears, rather than bouncing its output off the windscreen. The ‘Nautilus’ bit means there is a rear tubular chamber to absorb unwanted energy, to keep it from colouration of the output, while to quote B&W, its double dome tech is about, “a 25-micron aluminium dome tweeter, reinforced by a second 30-micron dome with the central portion removed surrounding its periphery. This helps isolate the tweeter dome, reducing unwanted resonances and colouration.”

By the way, Continuum cone technology is the evolution of Bowers & Wilkins’ once-exclusive use of Kevlar in speakers. As its period of exclusivity ended, the company set about developing a cone material that would outperform it. By the time Continuum was launched, it had taken eight years and seventy iterations to get its result. As such, B&W is protective of this proprietary tech and won’t reveal much about how it works.

Control for this amazing system is via the car’s central touchscreen, and the graphics are handsome. This is where you find the Abbey Road Studios Mode, sent to all cars over the air earlier this year, via the thirty-six-month SIM card installed in the car upon delivery. This also enables telephony and 5G use of high-end streaming such as Tidal, by the way.

Abbey Road Mode is a clever distillation of the essence of the studio. It’s about a combination of the emulation of room acoustics and the characteristics of older analogue off-board recording equipment. The premise is that you are sitting at the desk itself and can pretend you are the record producer. In the same way that the Gothenburg Concert Hall is a setting in the system DSP, there’s now an element of the classic Abbey Road control room acoustics in the mix. Certain bits of analogue recording equipment became legendary for their sonic fingerprint. An almost mystical quality of the designs made them so in-demand by recordists.

The Focusrite people – and yes, they did once spell it with two ‘ff’s – had a simple parametric studio EQ unit that didn’t mess with phase relationships, and these days, with just one F, the company’s USB computer audio interfaces feature a button marked AIR. Press it and the output acquires a slightly ethereal and breathy quality, like the old kit did. It’s entirely digital, rather than being an artefact of analogue circuit design.

Thus, Abbey Road Studios Mode has Vintage, Live Room and Modern settings in the Control Room portion, with emulations of equipment and room sounds woven into the DSP. You can use settings of either Intimate, Open, Energised, or Expansive as presets, with the ability to move the cursor around the screen and tweak it as you see fit in Producer Mode. The cutest thing is the graphics changing as you move from Vintage to Modern. The outlines of the B&W speaker models change to reflect what was in the rooms in each particular era.

The Listening

Being able to get involved in a car’s acoustic design at the manufacturer level is so much better than the old aftermarket model. For one, there is the de rigueur use of a centre channel with proper DSP, to make you feel like you have your own personal stereo soundstage in front of you. The aftermarket meant theft, so the mounting of ‘tweeter on top’ pods pointing straight at you was only sellable in Japan. Tweeter pods on stalks were sold as part of aftermarket component speakers, but in the UK and Europe, they would have been stolen. The sound of the Nautilus tweeters is sublime, being super-fast and absolutely able to do the delicate footwork as well as deliver what’s needed as the output becomes more muscular. Double-dome tech is a pure lift from B&W’s domestic offerings, as per the Continuum cone. That means a smooth and accurate sound.

The EX90 had a Tidal subscription loaded into it, and when my host first fired up Dire Straits’ Six Blade Knife, the detail was immediately apparent. There are what drummers call ‘traps’ just seventeen seconds in. It’s a sort of a rattle (as used by Blue Man Group as a gag, when theirs won’t stop) that is at the back of the mix and audibly down to the right. The band’s signature guitar sound is writ large, but instead of a simple background buzz, I could make out each tiny vibration and its place in space. It was impressively lifelike and easy to discern. The drivers all work well together, and clarity for me as a driver was excellent. Having speakers buried in the headrest to add to the psychoacoustic trick of the stereo image in front of you works well with good DSP.

The lead vocal in Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer is very prominent in the mix, with audible mouth sounds, plus layered backing vocals behind that are pure Beach Boys. Apparently, Brian Wilson asked this talented young singer to send him the song on a tape, bless him. Her voice was right in front of me, clear and distinct from the backing. Elton John’s Rocket Man, here mixed for Atmos, sounded fabulously clear and full, with apparently limitless dynamics. The central image was good and high in front of me, and if anything, just a bit richer and fuller with the Atmos contribution. Tonal accuracy of the system was commendable, as we’ve all heard Elton sing a thousand times, and these speakers have immense realism. It was impressive.

Yello’s Waba Duba is pure Swiss ridiculousness, and I absolutely loved it inside the EX90. It was breathtakingly full and textured, with vast scale and power. The immense bass was quite a thing – I had never heard a FreshAir woofer make good its boast about going down to 20Hz until then. And it wasn’t just thunderously deep, it was tight, controlled and composed even at very high levels. Charlie Puth singing If You Leave Me Now with the three remaining Boyz II Men was awesome. The three-dimensional aspect was such that I felt like I was there with them – and I swear I could hear how their voices have aged all these years later.

When it came to the Abbey Road Studios Mode, I could have spent forever messing about, for the quality of the DSP proved to be absolutely state-of-the-art. There are settings that would make a purist feel uncomfortable, as they can seriously alter your listening experience, but they can also seriously improve your musical experience. If you are a fan of particular genres of music, you may find yourself using one mode for rock, another for electronica, and another for classical, such was its power. However, I configured it; the recording’s clarity and accuracy are retained throughout.

The Verdict

To conclude, then, this Bowers & Wilkins system for the Volvo EX90 is gorgeous. From tinkly hi-hat cymbals and breathy vocal harmonics, impactful drums and crisp guitar edges, to visceral, subterranean bass, it has it all. What an absolutely fabulous option for this modern spaceship on wheels!

Thanks to Bowers & Wilkins’ Andy Kerr, Tom Henderson and George Fryer for their time and hospitality, as well as Volvo Cars UK’s Emily Wilson for access to its lovely EX90.

Visit Bowers & Wilkins for more information