Bowers & Wilkins Formation Flex

Compact Mono Speaker w/ Apple Airplay 2, Bluetooth Audio Streaming, Bluetooth, Ethernet Port, Roon Ready

Item #BW:FLEX
Bowers & Wilkins Item # FP41262

Bowers & Wilkins Formation Flex

Compact Mono Speaker w/ Apple Airplay 2, Bluetooth Audio Streaming, Bluetooth, Ethernet Port, Roon Ready

$499.00
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Overview

Formation Flex is a high performance, compact wireless speaker system. It is powerful enough to be used independently or in a pair for stereo sound. Sync it with other Formation speakers as part of a wireless whole home system or use as surround channels with a Formation Bar and Formation Bass for an impressive 5.1 experience.

High Notes

Compact, but Huge Sound

The Flex has the largest, most full sound of any speaker we have tested with this size footprint. It’s only about 5” in diameter but puts out room-filling sound.

Simple and Beautiful

The Flex is extremely simple to use and while sitting there sounding amazing, your eyes will love the museum quality appearance.

Bowers & Wilkins DNA

When you’ve been making great speakers for over 50 years, you tend to learn a few things. Bowers & Wilkins have certainly put their years of technology into the Flex.

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.

B&W formation flex speaker on  counter

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!

B&W Formation Flex speakers on console

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!

Details & Specs

Versatile in use

Use on its own, pair it with another Formation Flex for a compact stereo set, add a Formation Bass for more low-end extension, or add to a Formation Bar/Bass system for a total 5.1 surround sound experience.

Powerful in Performance

Deceptively small but features the same tweeter technology as our 600 Series for amazingly clear sound

The highest quality sound ever found in a standalone wireless speaker of its size

Scales to whole home

Fully integrates with Formation Suite products without loss or lag for wireless, multiroom sound

Immersive whole home wireless sound system

  • Streams 96/24 bit high-resolution stereo sound
  • Performance tweeter and woven glass fibre cone woofer technology
  • Features Formation Wireless Technology
  • WiFi, Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Roon, and Bluetooth compatible Sets up in moments
  • Synchronizes in perfected harmony with other Formation products

Technical Features

  • Apple Airplay 2 Technology
  • Spotify Connect
  • Roon Ready
  • Bluetooth with aptXTM HD
  • Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
  • Digital Amplifier
  • Dynamic EQ

Drive Units

  • 1 x 1” (25mm) decoupled double dome tweeter
  • 1 x 4” (100mm) woven glass fibre cone bass/midrange Connections Network (RJ45 Ethernet or Wifi)

Amplifier Power Output

  • 2 x 50W

Input Voltage

  • 100V – 240V -50/60HZ

Dimensions

  • Height: 8.5” (215mm)
  • Width: 5.2” (130mm)
  • Depth: 5.2” (130mm)
  • Weight: 5 lbs. (2.3 kg)
More Information
UPC 714346333158
Amp Power Output 2 x 50W
Drivers 1 x 1” (25mm) decoupled double dome tweeter
1 x 4” (100mm) woven glass fibre cone bass/midrange
Network Streaming Network (RJ45 Ethernet or Wifi)
Tweeter 600 Series tweeter
Woofer Woven glass fibre cone woofer technology
Customer Reviews
95% 4.8 / 5 - 8 reviews
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