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Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series grows wings
The 800 Series Diamond range is the iconic height of the UK-based brand: “everything we know, and everything we are”, as the company says. The new D4 incarnation continues the 800 Series’ reputation since John Bowers introduced the original 801 back in 1979, with the ‘D4’ indicating the fourth set to employ the company’s diamond tweeters, which sit in the decoupled ‘Solid Body Tweeter-on-Top’ housing. In the new series this has a longer tube-loading system, while the aluminium, milled from a single solid block, now has an anodised finish, either dark or light depending on the cabinet colour.
There’s an extra one of those too — a new satin walnut finish (shown on the 802 D4 above, second from left). This joins the gloss black, white, and satin rosenut options. The reverse-wrap cabinet design, first introduced in 2015 for the larger speakers in the series, is now extended to all five models, with front and sides as one continuous curve of laminate layers formed under heat and pressure and a rear spine of solid aluminium — a stiffer, more inert structure, while the curved front reduces the profile of each cabinet’s front baffle, so sound dispersion is improved, and cabinet reflections reduced.
Our favourite innovation is an all-new composite Biomimetic Suspension that replaces the conventional fabric spider for the woven silver-white Continuum (still a secret material) midrange cones on the four models that feature them. This new minimalist composite suspension reduces unwanted and unpredictable air pressure (i.e. sound) that the conventional fabric spider can generate, as shown in the modelling below. The company originally applied for a patent on this back in 2003, and it was granted in 2008; if we have identified the correct patent, the inventor was Stuart Nevill, who has since moved on to become audio acoustic manager at Apple. Andy Kerr, the company’s Director of Product Marketing & Communications, told a virtual gathering of Asia-Pac journos that it has taken since then for the biomimetic design to be developed for practical use, and confirmed that it cannot (yet!) be applied to woofers, as it can be used only where there is relatively minimal cone travel. But for the models that use midrange Continuum cones the claimed result is unprecedented transparency and realism in that frequency range. Mr Kerr also explained that the ‘biomimetic’ (i.e.
