★Carried & Installed

Bowers & Wilkins speakers · Kansas City.

IntegrateIT carries and installs Bowers & Wilkins across the Kansas City metro — the loudspeakers people know by sight, and the in-wall and in-ceiling ranges the same company builds for the rest of the house. One precision first, because the trade is sloppy about this word: Bowers & Wilkins is a line we carry and install under distribution, not one we hold our own dealer agreement on, so we do not call ourselves an authorized Bowers & Wilkins dealer. What we are is the people who draw the zone map, cut the openings in the right places, put the back boxes in while the wall is open and tune the house after the furniture arrives. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

The useful thing to know before any model number: the built-in range is not a lesser cousin of the floorstanders. Bowers & Wilkins calls it Integrated Solutions and publishes that it is “engineered using the same principles and technologies as every other Bowers & Wilkins speaker — they just don’t want all the attention.” That is the argument for running one brand through a whole house: the great room can have towers and the hallway can have a grille in the ceiling, and the two can still sound like they belong to the same building.

What we carry and install from Bowers & Wilkins

These are the families we specify here, and what each one is actually for:

• 800 Series Diamond D5. The current reference range — 801 D5, 802 D5, 803 D5 and 804 D5 towers, the 805 D5 standmount, and the HTM81 D5 and HTM82 D5 centre channels. This is what goes in the one room in the house built for listening, and the front stage of a dedicated theater that wants boxes rather than in-walls. The 800 Series Diamond D4 and the 800 Series Signature are still catalogued alongside it.
• 700 Series and 700 Series Signature. 702 S3, 703 S3 and 704 S3 floorstanders, 705 S3, 706 S3 and 707 S3 standmounts, HTM71 S3 and HTM72 S3 centres. The range most of our two-channel and living-room theater work actually lands on — the reference character without the reference footprint.
• 600 Series. 603 S3, 606 S3, 607 S3 and the HTM6 S3 centre. The sensible floor-standing answer for a media room, a bonus room or a second system, and a common pairing with an in-wall subwoofer where the floor plan has no room for a box.
• Nautilus and Signature. The halo models sit above all of it. We will specify them, and we will also say plainly when a room cannot hear the difference — the money is usually better spent on treatment and placement first.
• Reference Series — in-wall and in-ceiling. CWM7.3 S2, CWM7.4 S2, CWM7.5 S2, CWM8.3 D and CWM8.5 D in the wall; CCM7.3 S2, CCM7.5 S2 and CCM8.5 D in the ceiling. Bowers & Wilkins describes the range as “incredibly discrete yet capable of delivering highly accurate sound”, which is the right brief for the two or three rooms in a whole-house system where somebody actually sits down.
• Performance Series — the multi-room workhorse. CCM632, CCM662, CCM663, CCM664, CCM665, CCM683 and CCM684 in the ceiling; CWM652, CWM663 and CWM664 in the wall; plus the reduced-depth CCM663 RD and the single-point-stereo CCM663SR and CCM664SR. Published with QuickDogs mounting and plug-and-play wiring, which matters when a house has thirty openings rather than three.
• Flexible Series — CCM362, CCM382 and CWM362. The range built, in the manufacturer’s words, “to cope with more demanding environments” and reach “areas of the home that were previously off-limits”. Steam shower, covered porch, pool bath — the rooms a normal in-ceiling speaker does not survive.
• CT-800 Series — the custom theater range. CT8 LR and CT8 CC for behind an acoustically transparent screen, CT8.2 LCR and CT8.4 LCRS for in-wall duty, and the CT8 SW subwoofer. Bowers & Wilkins publishes that it drew the technology from the 800 Series and Nautilus for this range, which is the point of it.
• Subwoofers, in the wall and on the floor. ISW-3, ISW-4, ISW-6 and ISW-8 are the in-wall models; the DB Series (DB1D, DB2D, DB3D, DB4S) is the sealed, digitally amplified floor line; the ASW Series (ASW608, ASW610, ASW610XP) is the simpler one. Subwoofer placement gets measured rather than guessed, and in a Dolby Atmos room it is usually more than one.
• Outdoor and marine — AM-1, Marine 6 and Marine 8. The AM-1 architectural monitor is the outdoor model, published as resistant to dust, moisture and UV; the Marine models carry a marine-grade stainless chassis and grille. See the FAQ below for when we specify these on a Kansas City patio and when we do not.
• Panorama 3, Zeppelin Pro Edition and the wireless range. The soundbar and the wireless speakers are the answer for a bedroom or an office that is never going to be wired, and we will fit one rather than pretend every room deserves a rack.

We specify and install to order — we hold no shelf stock. Finishes, grille colours and back boxes are settled on the drawing, not on the install day.

How we design the line in

• The zone map first, the model last. Almost every distributed system that disappoints its owner was designed as a speaker count. Where somebody stands, what they want to hear there, and who else has to live with it decides the layout; choosing between a CCM664 and a CCM7.3 S2 is the easier problem and the smaller one.
• Two tiers, deliberately. Performance Series through the hallway, laundry, bath and office; Reference Series in the great room, the primary suite and the listening room. Spending the same amount in every room is how houses end up with expensive speakers in a closet and ordinary ones where the party happens.
• Back boxes and brackets at rough-in. An in-wall speaker in an open stud bay shares its enclosure with the room next door. Back boxes, pre-construction brackets and the cable path get settled while the ceiling is open — part of the pre-wire, not a retrofit conversation.
• The theater is a build, not a bracket. CT-800 behind an acoustically transparent screen means the baffle wall, the screen frame and the seating distance are one drawing. Get it wrong and you are either looking at grilles or listening to a soundstage that sits below the picture.
• Amplification sized to the load, and planned for heat. Impedance, channel count and rack ventilation are decided with the rack rather than discovered in it. Multichannel amplifiers in a sealed cabinet is the most common reason a good system starts shutting itself down in year two.
• One press in front of all of it. We are a Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom and a Crestron Elite Partner with programming done in house, so the speakers arrive attached to a keypad on the wall rather than a second app nobody opens.
• Tuned after the furniture. Hard floors, stone and big glass make bright rooms; rugs and upholstery pull them back. Levels matched zone to zone, equalisation set per room, maximum levels sanity-checked once the house is finished — not on the day the speakers went in.

Where it sits beside the lines we also carry

Bowers & Wilkins is the one-voice answer: a range deep enough to run a whole house without changing brands between the listening room and the laundry. Where a design brief forbids a grille at all, we are an authorized Sonance dealer and the Invisible Series gets skim-coated into the wall instead. The rest of what we carry solves narrower problems: Triad is built to order and painted to match, which wins when the architecture is the constraint, MartinLogan is the electrostatic route for a two-channel room, James by Sonance is the built-to-order small-aperture and outdoor line, TruAudio covers the volume architectural and landscape work, and Cabasse is the coaxial point-source alternative. In a reference room it is Wisdom Audio or JBL Synthesis, outside it is usually Coastal Source, and the amplification behind any of it is often NAD or a Control4 or Crestron matrix. We carry the whole spread, so the recommendation can be about the room rather than about what we happen to stock.

Common questions