The midrange is where the real musical action is invariably found, and a smooth midband is an invaluable loudspeaker quality. Enter Kevlar. It’s been Bowers & Wilkins’ cone material of choice since 1974, and with good reason. The basic woven fabric is first impregnated with a stiffening resin that cures during the cone forming process. The cone is then further treated with a polymer coat, which seals the fibres and adds damping. The result is a semi-flexible cone, which exhibits a peculiar style of break-up behaviour, not found in more conventional materials, that maintains a more constant dispersion pattern at all frequencies in its range and transmits far fewer delayed, time-smearing sounds to the listener. Not only does it deliver a cleaner sound, it can do so to a wider group of listeners.

You can read even more on Kevlar here, or let us know what you think about the results we’ve achieved using this distinctive material on our 600 Series speakers.

If you have a Zeppelin, we hope that you are already enjoying the fantastic sound that it offers. But as is always the way with hi-fi, if you put a bit of thought into placement the resulting performance will improve. Small things can make a big difference in audio.

For starters, the more solid a platform you can sit your Zeppelin on the better. We’re not saying it has to be on a dedicated hi-fi rack, necessarily, but as solid a base as you can manage is a good idea. It will pay dividends with the sound.

Also, think about space. As is the case with most hi-fi speakers, a little bit of breathing room does wonders for the sound. In the case of Zeppelin the subwoofer and flowport technology perform better with a little bit of space to ‘breath’. But, as always with hi-fi, a little experimentation will allow you to get the best possible sound for your own taste and the room in which you have the system.

Also, while Zeppelin has what can comfortably be described as a ‘room filling sound’, traditional hi-fi values can help when it comes to where you place the Zeppelin for listening. If you want a high-quality stereo image - where all the musicians appear in the areas of the soundstage where the producer intended them to be, then try placing the Zeppelin directly in front of your favourite listening position - this will work especially well if you decide to use you Zeppelin to boost the sound of your television as well as an iPod speaker.

There’s also an optional Zeppelin wall-bracket. This allows you to free up some valuable shelf space, and also makes it easy to position your Zeppelin below a wall-mounted flatscreen television.

Further adjustments can also be made by using the menu system that pops up on your iPod screen when attached to Zeppelin. A new menu option called ’speakers’ appears, and from here you can adjust the bass output of Zeppelin to suit your taste. Try it, and see what works for you.

And if you have any more Zeppelin set up tips, please feel free to post them here via a comment, so that others can learn from your experiences.

According to What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision the music industry is getting together to launch another new digital music format. The new downloadable format - currently called CMX - will provide users with more than just music. It will also offer lyrics, artwork and other bonus goodies.

There doesn’t appear to be any mention of sound quality yet - which worries us a little bit.

What do you think? Do we need another format? And if we do, surely it needs to offer high quality sound.

Free Lossless Audio Codec

The 24-bit FLAC files we offer full members of Society of Sound are proving incredibly popular. They are close to being the most popular of the three formats we offer, which is both reassuring, and a little bit surprising. Reassuring because we feel that they offer the best sound quality possible, and we know that like us you care about sound quality. Surprising, because they are a little trickier to handle than the other options - for example, Apple Lossless, which you can just dump them into the massively popular iTunes and listen to them.

So we’d like to ask you a question? How do you play them? On your computer, streamed to your hi-fi, copied to DVD or some other way?

There’s nothing we like more at Bowers & Wilkins’ London offices than racing in first thing in the morning, plugging an iPod into the office Zeppelin hitting ’shuffle songs’ and seeing what comes up.

The Bowers & Wilkins office Zeppelin

All of our music is stored in wonderful Lossless-quality audio obviously, so we get the very best out of the Zeppelin. This is one of the benefits of still using an older generation 160GB iPod Classic.

Here’s the first five that greeted us today.

Perfect Timing - Drive by Truckers
Heart Attack And Vine - John Hammond Jnr
Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
Danny & Dusty - Let’s Hide Away
Spare Parts II - Tom Waits

Let us know your first five in a comment below. We’ll give away three months full membership to Society of Sound to any that particularly catch our eye. No cheating now!

Computer Audiophile symposium

Demonstrating the complete journey from performing through recording to playback, Computer Audiophile have announced their inaugural Computer Audiophile Symposium taking place at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California.

With representatives from Meridian-Sooloos amongst others, the symposium will focus on getting the best high quality playback for your home. There will be demonstrations and discussons around the many new music server technologies now available, film formats and digital music distribution thr0ughout your home.

Stereophile.com are calling the event “the most comprehensive seminar ever devoted to high quality computer-based playback.”

The Symposium is being held in Studos A &D of the legendary Fantasy Studios and is a must for anyone interested in getting the best quality playback for their home.

Our set up in the London B&W office

As everyone knows, just as CDs supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are well on their way to replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music.

In our minds that usually means more convenience but worse sound - though that’s a whole other story which we’ve already covered extensively in our ‘Is studio recording killing music’ and ‘Does music sound better today than 30 years ago‘ exclusive podcasts.

Streaming music using services like Last FM and Spotify are becoming increasingly popular and physical sales are continuing on their way down but a great many people  still want to have something tangible.

CD sales account for 80% of total album sales, and although still tiny numbers, vinyl LPs purchased in 2008 almost doubled to 1.88 million units up from 0.99 million in 2007.

So what we want to know is, how do YOU listen to your music? We know you love music and we know you care how it sounds but we don’t know how you listen.

I’m guessing it’s a combination of the above but let us know, and even better, email us at sos@bwgroup.com or send us links to pictures of your set-ups - or indeed your favourite Walkman.

As you can see from our artful photograph , we primarily use Sonos and our Zeppelin though we do have in-wall CCM817s too.  And should you wish to know, as I write we are listening to a 62 track Crosby Stills and Nash marathon.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

So, you’ve bought your brand new speakers - be it our award-laden Zeppelin ipod system, the equally heavily awarded 685s or a gleaming pair of 802D’s - and you’re lining up your favourite music to test them on.

We want to know what you’ve found sounds the best. Which stand-out  track would you play when your friends come round and you want to really show them off, or perhaps justify why you bought them to your partner.

It might be that you hear something new in an old favourite that you’d never heard before or that suddenly it sounds as if Keith Richards is playing in front of you.

The Daily Growl from Lambchop’s Is A Woman sounds brilliant on my 684’s - there is a beautiful depth and warmth and a really immediate live feel that always makes people ask who the artist is.

We’d love to hear from you on what makes your speakers sing.

The eminent sound artist Janet Cardiff is the latest Fellow to join Society of Sound. She works mainly in collaboration with her partner George Bures Miller, and - according to Wikipedia - “first gained international notoriety…in 1995.”

Her latest installation, The Murder of Crows, uses one hundred B&W speakers and is at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Gegenwart (Contemporary Art), Berlin from 14th March – 17th May 2009.

She has given us an exclusive interview with fascinating insights into her synaesthesia, how she recorded the individual parts for 40 Part Motet,  and why she likes Nick Cave.

We are particularly proud of our Fellows area, apart from Janet this year we have welcomed such musical luminaries as Alfred Brendel and Springsteen guitarist Steve Van Zandt. The one connection between all of them is their passion for amazing sound.

We choose our Fellows because they inspire us. If there’s anyone you would like to see here who you think has made an outstanding contribution to sound, please let us know.