Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar Soundbar Review

It's a very stylish soundbar with a unique geometric design. It's made of solid plastic, with premium-looking fabric covering the front. There are also circular metal plates on the ends.

You can purchase a Formation Bass subwoofer from the manufacturer separately.

The manufacturer also sells Formation satellites separately. You can choose between speakers like the Formation Duo, the Formation Wedge, and the Formation Flex.

This soundbar is quite large. It likely won't fit between the legs of a 55 inch TV stand. That said, it shouldn't block your TV screen unless your TV sits flush on your table.

The back of the bar is made of plastic. There's an opening for the inputs and the power cable. You can also mount it to your wall using the included proprietary mounting plate. First, you need to unscrew the plastic base, and then you can attach the mounting plate to the bar.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has a good build quality. The back side of the bar is made of plastic, which feels quite solid and durable, and there are metal plates on the ends of the bar. While the fabric covering the front seems quite premium, it's also a bit loose. It seems like it could tear easily, especially if you press too hard on the fabric. Also, the bar gets pretty warm, even if you only use it for a few minutes.

• Manuals
• Mounting plate
• Power cable
• Optical cable
• Hex allen key
• Screws and washers

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has a decent stereo frequency response. Its frequency response is somewhat neutral, with some extra muddiness in the high-bass that can thin out vocals and lead instruments, and a touch of extra brightness in the treble. It struggles to reproduce low-bass, so you don't feel the deep thump and rumble in bass-heavy music or action-packed movies. In our subjective listening tests, the lack of low-bass was very evident. We felt that the bar sounds pretty neutral overall, but it lacks extra feeling and richness compared to other premium bars such as the Bose Smart Soundbar 900.

There are bass and treble adjustments to help you customize its sound. However, if you prefer a neutral sound profile, we recommend using this soundbar with its default settings.

This soundbar has a decent stereo soundstage. The soundstage is perceived to be a bit smaller than the bar itself, which can be disappointing for listeners who want to feel like audio is coming from all around them. That said, it has good focus, so sound objects seem to come from an accurate, pinpoint location rather than a more generalized area.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has very good stereo dynamics. This soundbar gets pretty loud, so it's suitable for listening to music in large rooms and at crowded parties. However, there's some compression when you push it to max volume that can impact the sound quality.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has a great stereo THD performance. At a normal listening volume, THD falls within good limits, meaning audio reproduction is clean and pure. While there's a jump in THD across the range at max volume, this may not be too noticeable to most listeners with real-life content.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has a good center channel performance. This 3.0 setup offers a discrete center channel, so voices are anchored to a pinpoint location in the soundstage. Dialogue can seem muddy, however, and it can also sound a bit bright.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar has a poor surround performance. This 3.0 setup has to downmix surround content into stereo to play it. However, this doesn't reproduce surround objects as clearly and accurately as a discrete setup. Audio seems like it's coming from in front of you rather than from speakers placed all around you. Also, you don't feel the low rumble in the bass during action-packed scenes.

For a standalone bar with Atmos support, check out the Bowers & Wilkins Panorama 3.

This bar has a terrible selection of sound enhancement features. There are bass and treble adjustments so you can customize its sound, but it lacks more premium features like a graphic EQ or room correction. For a premium bar with more sound enhancement features, check out the Samsung HW-Q950A.

There's a very limited selection of physical inputs. You can plug it into your TV with the included optical cable, but it lacks HDMI connections, so it can't send lossless and object-based audio formats like Dolby Atmos or DTS:X. There's also an ethernet port and a USB port for servicing the bar.

This soundbar only supports Dolby Digital content via optical. While this common surround sound format is used on many Blu-rays and streaming platforms, unfortunately, there's no DTS support.

This soundbar has a decent latency performance. Its latency via Optical is fairly high, so you can notice a delay between the video you see and the audio you hear, especially with lip-syncing. That said, some apps and TVs can compensate for latency differently, so your real-world experience can vary.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar supports lots of wireless playback options. However, during our testing, we had some issues connecting the bar via Bluetooth. Its setup isn't very intuitive since you need to use the Formation app for the setup. Also, we had to reset the bar to get it to connect via Bluetooth. Some other users report a similar issue with Bluetooth connectivity here. There was also a noticeable difference in audio quality when listening to music via Spotify over Apple AirPlay 2. The quality improved when we listened to the same songs on YouTube.

This soundbar is also advertised to support Spotify Connect, and it's Roon Ready, which is handy for listeners who use these music services.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar doesn't have a display. Instead, there's a small button on top of the bar that changes color depending on the settings you adjust. Since it's located towards the back of the bar, you can't see the button if you're sitting down on your couch.

There are some physical controls on the back of the bar so you can adjust the volume and play/pause your music. Also, the Formation button lets you change the input. However, you need to use the app to change any additional settings.

The Bowers & Wilkins Formation Bar doesn't have a remote, which might disappoint some users. Since there aren't any HDMI connections on the bar, you also can't use HDMI CEC to control the bar with your TV remote. The manufacturer says that you can use the Formation app to program IR TV remote control, but it might not work with all TVs. In our tests, we weren't able to connect the remote from our Samsung HW-Q80T TV.

This soundbar doesn't have built-in voice assistant support. The manufacturer says that you can pair it with a third-party Amazon Alexa device to control the bar using your voice.

You need to use two different apps to get this soundbar to work properly. First, the Bowers & Wilkins Formation app lets you connect the soundbar to Wi-Fi, set up Amazon Alexa with a third-party device, and activate IR remote control. It also has bass and treble adjustments so you can control the bar's sound, and it even lets you update the bar's firmware. However, if you want to control the bar's volume, you need to download the Bowers & Wilkins Music app. This app also gives you access to different music services that you can stream to the bar.

Like many users, we find it very inconvenient that we're only able to control the bar via the app. There are also many reports of glitches on the app, especially after updating the bar's firmware. You can see some examples of these reports in the comments here.

This soundbar goes into standby mode after 20 minutes of inactivity, and you can wake it up by pressing the Formation button. There's no HDMI CEC, but you can program IR TV remote control via the app. That said, it may not work with all TVs.