Bowers & Wilkins: The Official Speakers of Abbey Road Studios
Imagine How They Will Sound in Your Own Home’s Listening Room
Abbey Road studios has a long and fabled history. It is perhaps best known for the 1969 namesake Beatles album, the band’s 11th studio album and the last in which all of them participated. Abbey Road Studios, however, predated the Beatles.
In 1931, the Gramophone Company – the predecessor to British record label EMI – converted what had been a century-old Georgian townhouse into a recording studio. In 1934, the inventor of stereo sound, Alan Blumlein, recorded Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony at the studio. Abbey Road Studios also became known for the innovative recording techniques pioneered in the 1960s by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Cliff Richard, with the help of imaginative producers and sound engineers like George Martin. Today, the studio is owned by Universal Music Group, one the world’s largest record labels.
Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) has a remarkable history of its own, if not as long as Abbey Road Studios. In 1966, John Bowers and Roy Wilkins started building loudspeakers out of a workshop in the back of an electronics shop. In the early days, the firm made public address systems, building their expertise in speaker design. By 1972, the firm had its first research facility with anechoic chambers for detailed testing. Over the decades, B&W has established its name at the forefront of high-end audio reproduction, and in recent years the company has extended its sound know-how into headphones, automobile audio, wireless, and architectural speakers.
For 15 years, Abbey Road Studios used the B&W 800D Mk1 as studio monitors, because of their incredibly accurate sound reproduction. Abbey Road recently underwent the most significant transformation in its history, adding two new studios in 2017. In 2018, the companies announced a new partnership of the venerated audio brands, where B&W is the official speaker and headphone of the famed studio.
Read on to learn more about Bowers & Wilkins speakers at Abbey Road studios. If professional sound engineers at Abbey Road use them, imagine how good they will sound in your Dunwoody-area home’s listening room.