April 2017
Since I began measuring the performance of headphones six years ago, it’s been quite a journey. Not a journey through a picturesque mountain landscape dotted with rustic inns, but more like one through searing deserts and freezing snowscapes packed with predators and empty of civilized comforts. The prevailing standard for headphone measurements, IEC 60268-7, was originally published in 1984 by the International Electrotechnical Commission, “a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies,” per Wikipedia. It’s an in-depth and well-considered standard, but most of it is now more than an entire human generation old -- in technological terms, perhaps ten generations. Some of its recommendations have been called into question by more recent research, and some reflect limitations and conditions that time has erased.
In 1966, John Bowers and his friend Roy Wilkins established B&W Electronics Ltd. -- the seed money had come from an elderly lady who’d been deeply impressed with Bowers’s knowledge of classical music and the quality of the speakers he’d built for her. The same year saw the development of B&W’s first loudspeaker, the P1. Now, 50 years later, Bowers & Wilkins has grown into one of the world’s best-known loudspeaker brands, with a huge variety of products and a distribution chain that spans the globe. Its 50th year saw the redesign of B&W’s flagship 800-series speakers, and the introduction of their first flagship headphones model: the subject of this review, the P9 Signature ($899.99 USD).
