Signature Diamond Speakers Are The Stiffest Going

Forget fancy equalizers and phat bass: accurate reproduction is the name of the audiophile game. According to Bowers & Wilkins, stiffness is where it's at. And what's stiffer than diamond?

"The challenge is to find a material that is infinitely stiff and can be accurately formed into a wafer-thin, lightweight tweeter dome. That’s all there is to it. It’s that easy."

Therefore, the tweeter is made of exactly that — "the engineering case for a diamond tweeter dome is overwhelming" — molded into the correct shape and ensconced in a marble tube. This provides a potential frequency response of up to 28 kHz or so, safely above what can be heard by even the most discerning humans.

"But what does a diamond tweeter do for the sound? Like the diamond technology, it’s easy to ask and difficult to answer - far better you hear it for yourself."

In the manual, B&W warns against making hasty judgments on the tweeters due to their increased detail and apparent hardness — it'll "seem to mellow" soon enough.

A pair of complete units will set you back $11k.

Product Page [B&W]