Kevlar
The midrange is where the real musical action is invariably found, and
a smooth midband is an invaluable loudspeaker quality. Enter Kevlar.
It’s been B&W’s cone material of choice since 1974, and with good
reason. The basic woven fabric is first impregnated with a stiffening
resin that cures during the cone forming process. The cone is then
further treated with a polymer coat, which seals the fibres and adds
damping. The result is a semi-flexible cone, which exhibits a peculiar
style of break-up behaviour, not found in more conventional materials,
that maintains a more constant dispersion pattern at all frequencies in
its range and transmits far fewer delayed, time-smearing sounds to the
listener. Not only does it deliver a cleaner sound, it can do so to a
wider group of listeners.
Crossover tuning
The parts of a speaker doing the hard, mechanical work, the drivers,
act on the signals distributed to them by the electrical processing
part: the crossover. The thing to look for is its simplicity. Some
speakers demand complex crossovers to compensate for the shortcomings
in their drive units. The better the mechanical design, the simpler the
electronic design can be.
The engineers at B&W are still working to understand fully why and
how certain components influence the sound of a speaker. Since
different manufacturers’ versions of nominally the same component
significantly alter the character of the sound, the experts at B&W
feel the only solution is to put their trust in their ears and to
choose what sounds best. They carry out exhaustive listening tests
rigorously assessing the performance of each component until they find
the optimum component for each position in the circuit. Fine-tuning by
ear is only possible if the crossover is simple and the section of the
crossover that perhaps benefits most from our policy of
listen-and-learn is the part handling the signal for the tweeter. In
most B&W speakers, it is carried by a single, ear-chosen component
that preserves the very finest detail.
Nautilus Tapering Tube
The sound of silence. Not all sound generated by speaker drive units is
good sound. The kind that emerges from the back of a working driver,
into a conventional box cabinet, can bounce around and make a mess of
the good sound coming out of the front. B&W’s trailblazing
Nautilus™ speaker found a way around boxes. Tapering tubes filled with
absorbent wadding soaked up the wayward sound energy and reduced
resonances to an insignificant minimum.
Nautilus™ Tapering Tubes are fitted to nearly all B&W speakers,
even when they’re not visible to the eye. Sound is channelled through a
hollow pole magnet, away from the diaphragm, and disappears into the
tail. So all the sound you hear is good sound.
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