The loudspeaker that loses the least: Abbey Road's reference since 1980, built in Worthing since 1966.

John Bowers and Roy Wilkins met in the war. Bowers, from Worthing on the Sussex coast, joined the Royal Corps of Signals at seventeen and was posted to Whaddon Hall, an outstation of Bletchley Park, where the two of them kept radio contact with agents and resistance fighters in occupied Europe and planned the business they would start when it was over. In August 1946 they opened a small shop in Worthing for amateur-radio enthusiasts, then sold and rented amplifiers, loudspeakers and televisions, with a repair workshop run by Peter Hayward. Bowers, who loved classical music and solo piano above all, modified the loudspeakers he sold to reproduce it better, and sold the results in small numbers to customers who asked for them.

The company proper dates from 1966 and a bequest. Miss Knight, a former opera singer and a loyal customer, left John Bowers ten thousand pounds in her will to pursue the loudspeaker business. He left the shop to Roy Wilkins, took Peter Hayward with him, and founded B&W Loudspeakers Ltd in the garages behind it; Roy's son Paul joined to sell what it made. The P1 of 1967 was the first product, and its profits bought test equipment. Bowers hired Dennis Ward, EMI's technical manager for drive units, so the company could design its own, and the DM70 of 1970 was the result, a bass unit under a curved electrostatic panel. Exports were sixty percent of production by 1973 and ninety percent by 1978, each earning a Queen's Award, and in 1976 the DM6, styled by Kenneth Grange and nicknamed the Pregnant Penguin, introduced the yellow woven Kevlar cone that would identify B&W for the next forty years.

In 1979, after four years of research with computer modelling and laser interferometry, B&W's engineers were given free rein and produced the 801: in the words of its manual, the first commercial effort to develop and produce a loudspeaker that would reflect the highest standards attainable. In 1980 John Bowers took a pair to Abbey Road and demonstrated them as a new generation of loudspeakers for both the professional and the exceptionally critical listener; the engineers adopted them, Decca and Deutsche Grammophon followed, and the 800 Series has been in Abbey Road's control rooms through six generations since. A year after the 801 the company set up the Steyning Research Establishment, its research home for almost four decades. The Matrix 801 of 1987 filled the cabinet with an interlocking lattice of panels, and the Matrix idea has been in every 800 Series since. John Bowers died late that year, and Robert Trunz led the company after him.

Bowers's last experiment was carried on by the Steyning team and above all by Laurence Dickie, who gave each driver a long tapered tube to absorb its rear radiation and curled the bass tube into a spiral. After nearly five years the Nautilus appeared in 1993, named for the shell it resembled, and it is still built by hand at Dale Road in Worthing. Its tubes went behind the tweeters of the Nautilus 800 Series of 1998, which also introduced the FST midrange and the tweeter in its own pod on top of the cabinet. In 2005 the 800 Series Diamond put a dome of synthetic diamond in that pod, and the company won a Queen's Award for Innovation. By 2013 the Worthing factory employed about 320 people and built the 800 Series from the ground up, with the diamond domes grown for it by a division of De Beers.

The 800 Series Diamond D3, announced in 2015 and completed in 2016 for the company's fiftieth anniversary, changed nearly everything but the tweeter: the Turbine Head of solid aluminum, the Reverse Wrap cabinet, Aerofoil bass cones, and Continuum, the woven composite that retired Kevlar after B&W admitted it had thought nothing could beat it. The 700 Series inherited the new drivers in 2017, and the research establishment moved from Steyning to a new building at Southwater in 2019, with three floating listening rooms, two anechoic chambers and a recreation of John Bowers's own listening room. The D4 of 2021 added the Biomimetic Suspension and the aluminum top plate, the 801 and 805 D4 Signature of 2023 raised the parts quality, and the 700 S3 of 2022 and 600 S3 of 2023, with the 700 S3 Signature of 2024, brought Continuum, tube loading and tweeter-on-top housings to every price the company sells at. The headphones, from the Pi8 to the Px7 S3 and Px8 S2, have carried the same drivers' thinking since 2024.

Ownership has changed hands more than the engineering has. Joe Atkins, who had taken control in 1996, sold to EVA Automation of Silicon Valley in 2016; the company was separated again in 2020 and joined Sound United that October, with Denon and Marantz; Masimo bought Sound United in 2022, and in September 2025 HARMAN, Samsung's audio division, completed its purchase, with Bowers & Wilkins keeping its name, its Worthing factory and its research team. In June 2025 the 801 Abbey Road Limited Edition marked forty-five years of the studio relationship, and in June 2026, in the company's sixtieth year, the 800 Series Diamond D5 was revealed in Vienna and went on sale in September. The 800 Series and the Nautilus are still hand-built at Dale Road in Worthing; the 700 and 600 Series, the subwoofers and the headphones are designed and engineered in England and built in B&W's own factory in Zhuhai, China, with the midrange cones made in the UK. John Bowers's measure of a loudspeaker was that the best one loses the least, and it is still the one the company builds to.