Bowers & Wilkins Formation Flex
Free Shipping On All Orders, No Minimums.
We offer free 2-day shipping on most products within the continental US.
Weekdays - Orders placed by 2pm EST ship same day. Orders placed after 2pm EST will ship the following business day.
Weekends - Orders placed on Saturday and Sunday will ship Monday.
Orders requiring motor freight delivery may take more than two business days. Once your order has shipped, you'll receive a shipping confirmation email with a tracking number for easy tracking.
Orders for Open Box products ship with free ground shipping within the continental United States.
Orders that contain items that are currently backordered, special order, or out of stock will ship complete once all items are in-stock unless otherwise requested.
If you need it faster, you will have the option of choosing a quicker shipping option when you checkout on the website.
At this time, we do not ship internationally and orders to Hawaii and Alaska may incur an additional shipping charge. Please contact us at 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com to confirm.
Rerouting and Address Changes
We cannot make ANY address changes once an order is placed. If you are unable to accept delivery of your package as ordered, we will need to cancel your order, return the package to sender and have you replace your order through our website.
Keep the Box
We suggest you keep the shipping box or boxes for at least 30 days. It is actually a great idea to keep boxes for audio products for the life of the product. Having the box and all packing will increase the trade-in value should you decide to move up and they are handy to have should you ever need to send the unit in for repair.
How To Receive a Motor Freight Order
The trucking company will contact you to schedule a convenient time to deliver the order. Please note that you must be present for delivery.
Visually inspect the box to make sure you see no signs of damage. If you notice any damage at all, take some pictures with your phone and make a note of them on the delivery receipt the driver will ask you to sign. If it is obvious that the product is damaged, please refuse the order and contact us immediately at 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com.
Open your box as soon as possible and inspect the product for damage and contact us if you find anything wrong.
FedEx Freight Service Comparison
| Feature / Service | Scheduled Curbside Delivery | White Glove Delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled delivery appointment | ✔ | ✔ |
| Delivery location | Ground level only (garage, front door, loading dock) | Room of choice, any floor |
| Delivery team | 1 person | 2 people |
| Placement inside home/business | ✘ | ✔ |
| Upstairs / downstairs delivery | ✘ | ✔ |
| Unpacking | ✘ | ✔ (upon request) |
| Packaging removal | ✘ | ✔ (upon request) |
| Assembly / installation | ✘ | ✘ |
| Old item removal | ✘ | ✘ |
At Audio Advice, we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction. We'll bend over backward to make sure you're 100% satisfied and we won't accept anything less. We offer 30-day hassle-free returns and personalized service from real, live people.
If an item doesn't meet your expectations, you may return or exchange it in its original condition and packaging within 30 days for a full refund, minus shipping fees. Items shipped back in like new condition through standard shipping carriers will incur a minimum $15 return shipping fee. If the items were initially shipped through free scheduled delivery via motor freight (commonly referred to as LTL), returning them will result in return shipping fees starting at $150. These items include but are not limited to, oversized items such as TVs, certain subwoofers, floorstanding speakers, furniture, and most items weighing over 75 pounds. Return fees will also apply for exchanges. We want to treat your system as if it is our own and want you to be completely satisfied with your purchase.
Please see the instructions below. We only accept returns for any product purchased directly from our website. If merchandise is not returned in its original condition or is missing packaging, manuals, accessories or other parts, or the resale value of the product has been impaired, a partial refund will be given and calculated on a case-by-case basis.
Non-Returnable Items
The following items cannot be returned or cancelled:
- Special/Custom Order Items
- Gift Cards
- In-ear headphones cannot be returned once the packaging has been opened due to personal hygiene reasons. Please contact our customer care team if you'd like help choosing.
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Turntables With a Broken Stylus: All turntables ship out with the stylus intact. If you return a turntable or phono cartridge with a broken or missing stylus you will be subject to a return fee. Please be careful when setting up your turntable and contact us with any questions.
Is It Easy To Return An Item?
Yes, simply give us a call at 888.899.8776 or you can email our support team at support@audioadvice.com. Many times our team of experts can help figure out why the product might not be working like you expected and get things fixed over the phone, so don’t be surprised if we ask a few questions, we love troubleshooting!
If our tech help can not make you happy, we will email over a return shipping label with a Return Number.
Hopefully, you saved all of the original item’s box and packaging inserts. You will want to pack back up your return or exchange in the same way it came out of the original box. Once you have everything packaged correctly, tape the box on the top and bottom to assure it stays together. If Audio Advice shipped the item to you inside a second box, it's a good idea to use that same extra box to help prevent damage on its way back to us. To avoid it accidentally coming back to you, use a magic marker to cross out the old shipping label or just tear it off.
The return shipping label we send you will have our address on it, just make sure you take the box to the right shipper (UPS, FEDEX, or USPS) as per the label.
If you are close to one of our stores, please let us know if it is more convenient for you to return it to us directly. You will still need to get a return number by contacting us and shipping and/or restocking charges may apply.
When Will I See My Refund?
It usually takes around 7-14 days for the refund to show up on the payment method you used. We do inspect all returns for damage and accuracy of the item inside the box before issuing a refund. Some items may be subject to shipping and restocking fees.
Can I Exchange My Purchase For Something Different?
Sometimes those big speakers just don’t fit in the room or you might have bought a small subwoofer and later found out you’d love a bigger one. If you would like to make an exchange within 30 days of receiving your item, just give us a call at 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com and we will help work out the details. Additional shipping charges and return costs may apply.
How Do I Cancel An Order?
If the item has already shipped out or is a special order item, it is not possible to cancel the order. Please contact us at 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com to start the return process.
What If I Find Shipping Damage?
We need to know right away about any shipping damage. Please contact us at 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com within 48 hours of your delivery so we can get the ball rolling on making things right. It’s very helpful to take some pictures and email them to us if possible.
Can I Refuse A Shipment?
You can, but unless the item is damaged, shipping and restocking fees will be deducted from your refund. If your item arrives damaged and you are lucky enough to be there, snap some quick pics and refuse the order. Then contact us so we can get a replacement on the way.
What Happens If My Order Is Defective?
This is actually pretty rare, most consumer electronics work fine out of the box 99.9% of the time. We’d like for you to contact us first by calling 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com so we can help get to the bottom of things. If your item is indeed defective during the first 30 days, we can usually exchange it for a new, replacement unit.
What About Service After 30 Days?
Audio Advice has a great relationship with all of our brands and can help you with warranty service by the brand after our 30-day guarantee period. Even after the warranty expires, we can arrange for service by the brand on products purchased from Audio Advice. Just call 888.899.8776 or email support@audioadvice.com.
How Do You Determine A Restocking Fee?
You may not believe it, but sometimes we receive items back that were put in the box with zero packaging and are completely destroyed or are missing many of the pieces that came with the item. We also track serial numbers and will get back different serial numbers. We’ve even seen different items than what we shipped out be returned. However, it’s very important to package your return properly so that nothing goes missing or gets damaged in shipping, which will result in a restocking fee or even no refund at all. If a product is opened and the market value of the product is reduced, then a restocking fee may be applied to the cost of restocking and the reduced market value of the product. The bottom line is if you treat us fairly, we will do the same.
Audio Advice strives to provide industry-leading support and service while also maintaining the lowest prices available on products for our customers. We work hard with our vendors to bring our customers the best products at each price point. As a part of that process, we work with our vendors to provide the lowest pricing in our stores and on our website.
Our prices should always be the same as any other authorized dealer, including big-box retailers and major online retailers.
If you believe that you have found a lower advertised price from a legitimate authorized seller, call us and let us know so we can make sure we can correct any inadvertent error on our side. As a matter of policy, we update our prices automatically if a vendor changes its authorized pricing policies, so we generally have the best prices all the time. Increasingly, there are knock-off copies of products online, usually sold by non-authorized dealers.
Please be sure that the item meets the following conditions:
- The item is brand new, in stock, and available for purchase
- The item has the identical model number, color, etc as the item on our site.
- The seller is an authorized dealer
As always, our goal is to provide a terrific customer experience, including industry low prices. We appreciate your support.
Overview
Company & Product Overview
The year was 1981 when Audio Advice first became a dealer for Bowers & Wilkins speakers. No other speaker brand we know of continues to push the limits of technology for the betterment of improved sound. They plow more dollars back in the research and development than most speaker companies' total sales volume. This philosophy has enabled them to stay ahead of their competitors for decades.
Unless you have been hiding out on a desert island, you’ve probably noticed a huge amount of wireless speaker choices that have come out over the last 10-15 years. This is one area Bowers & Wilkins dabbled in with a couple of products but never had an entire group of choices that could work together. In 2017 we started hearing some chatter that they were working on a whole family of wireless products that, in typical Bowers & Wilkins fashion, would far exceed anything on the market.
Unlike just making a speaker you connect up to an amplifier, designing a great sounding, reliable, and easy to use wireless speaker is far more difficult. First you have to get the sound right, then it has to work flawlessly on a variety of wireless networks, and finally, it needs to be very easy to use and set up. Audio Advice has seen more companies fail in one of these areas than those who have nailed it in all of them. Bowers & Wilkins made the commitment to invest in R&D to come up with something that was truly better.
The new series they introduced in 2019 is called Formation. The initial products are a pair of powered speakers called the Duo, a large single speaker called the Wedge, a subwoofer named Bass, a soundbar they named Bar, and device to add Formation to any audio system, you guessed it, called Audio.
These new products did set a new standard for wireless gear, but when we analyzed it all, we felt a smaller speaker that had flexible options was missing from the series. Well, friends, the answer is Flex and it is available now!
Design & Build Quality
Just like with the first release of Formation, Audio Advice was fortunate to get a pre-release prototype to check out. We got ours a couple of weeks before the Formation Flex was scheduled to be announced to the public.
The Formation Flex falls into a very crowded category of wireless speakers. Like models from Sonos, Bose, Apple, Heos, Klipsch, JBL and many more, the Flex is a fairly compact single speaker, however, its a little bigger with far more under the hood than its competitors!
The Flex speaker has a look that is similar to the other new Formation products with its sculpted grille. It is 8 ½” tall, 5” wide, and has a pretty hefty 5-pound weight. The bottom of the speaker has a gold ring with the Bowers & Wilkins logo across the bottom. The top of the Formation Flex has a shiny black finish that will reveal some touch-sensitive controls for play/pause and volume up/down. In our opinion, the Flex is the best looking speaker in the all in one category. You might think it came out of an art museum!
The underside of the Formation Flex has a recessed connection for its power cord, an ethernet jack should you want to hardwire it, and a reset button.
Needless to say, build quality on all Bowers & Wilkins products is outstanding. These have the fit and finish you would expect from a premium product.
Features & Technology
When Bowers & Wilkins set out to make a better wireless music system, they looked at the three main things that can plague any wireless music system. The first one is how the wireless system communicates with your network. The next is how two speakers acting as a stereo pair in the same room stay in sync with each other. Normal speakers do not have to worry about this, but wireless speakers do and our brain has a much harder time telling us there is beautiful music in front of us when things are not synced up. In testing all of the competition, Bowers & Wilkins discovered this was a big area for improvement. The final one is keeping all of the speakers in your entire house in sync.
After almost two years of R&D and 70 patents later, Bowers & Wilkins came up with a unique system to address all three of these critical aspects of wireless music systems. Basically, every Formation piece has three different antenna systems. They have a proprietary mesh network that ties all of the Formation products together so it is no relying on your home WiFi for music. Control is through WiFi, but the music passes through its own system. Of course, this tech costs more, but the end result is a wireless music system that performs like no other.
Formation products are very easy to set up. The first piece takes about 2 minutes and the others you add, just take seconds. The Formation app will find your first unit, then find your wireless network. All you do is enter your WiFi password and it completes everything in about a minute.
You’ll have a multitude of easy ways to send music to your Formation product. Apple Airplay 2, Bluetooth® with aptX™ HD, and Spotify Connect cover just about everything. Plus for the music enthusiast, all Formation products are Roon Ready. Formation products are also Hi-Res Audio ready with 24/96 capability.
Bowers & Wilkins used a very similar tweeter in the Flex as their 600 series home speakers. It is a decoupled dome tweeter. A 4” woven glass fiber cone bass/midrange driver covers the critical midrange and bass frequencies. Each driver has its own 50-watt power amp with digital signal processing to get the most out of each driver. There are no passive crossover components like a typical home speaker with the crossover to each driver taking place in the digital domain, then routing the signal to the individual amp for each speaker driver. This type of design is used in most good powered speakers and does allow the designer to squeeze a whole lot more performance out of the speakers.
Flex, as the name implies, also gives you many flexible use options. Obviously, it can be used all by itself. In addition, you can assign one as left and one right for a stereo pair. You can also use a pair of them as rear speakers with the Formation Bar (their soundbar). And finally, you can pair any of these combinations with the Formation Sub. Now that is flexible!
Performance
We tested the Flex using our Roon account, and just like the other Formation products we have tried, everything worked flawlessly.
The first thing that stood out to us was how big a sound this little speaker threw out into the room. It sounded far larger than it’s size!
We then put it in a position where we could walk around from all sides and were very impressed with the dispersion of the tweeter. While you get a little bit of high-frequency roll-off as you get way off-axis, its much less than most conventional speakers. This means the little Flex will give you detailed sound in just about any spot in the room its placed in.
Voices are very clear and the top end is super open and extended. This little guy sounds like a decent home speaker. The bottom end is what is the most impressive though. Most speakers with this kind of footprint have bass, but it is more of the one-note variety where it is hard to hear tonal differences and is bloated in the midbass. We do have to say, we needed to play around with the distance the Flex was off the nearest wall to optimize the bass. About 4” to 6” off the wall gave us the best results. When you get it dialed in, the bass impact is big and tuneful. That little 4” glass fiber woofer coupled with the dedicated amp and DSP reaches down quite low. But you do not sacrifice anything in the midrange/midbass as voices and acoustic instruments sound very natural.
As a final test, we put on some big rock and roll and cranked the volume up to the max, just to see how much room-filling sound the Flex could provide. We happened to be doing this test at home which resulted in much shouting from across the house to turn down the really loud music. In other words, Flex can rock! Bowers & Wilkins have done a good job of making sure even when you push the Flex to 100% there was no sign of strain or break up either.
Bowers & Wilkins has put their DNA inside the Flex. It has that classic sound that does not add anything to the music. It simply enables you to become more connected to your favorite music in a way you just have to experience.
We wished Bowers & Wilkins had sent us another one so we could test them out as a pair! Overall, we were very pleased with the sound the Flex provided given its tiny footprint.
Overall Recommendation
Bowers & Wilkins’s Formation series is at the premium end of the scale for wireless home music systems. However, every single one we have tested outperforms its competitor by a pretty big margin. You definitely get what you pay for with Formation! The Flex brings great Bowers & Wilkins sound down to a much more affordable price point and it takes up less space than a CD case sitting on your desk. Flex can be the beginning point of a great whole-house wireless music system that is fun to use and a joy to the eyes and ears!
