B&W : NAUTILUS (BLACK)

Nautilus™ is our touchstone. A five-year research project into creating the ultimate loudspeaker that has now been on sale for 16 years. Sounds and looks like no other loudspeaker.

Design classic Now recognised as a design classic, the original Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus™ is not just our flagship product, but the very pinnacle of technological innovation to which all others must aspire. It is the result of a groundbreaking, five year research and development programme to achieve, as near as possible, the perfect loudspeaker. The Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus is recognised worldwide as an outstanding loudspeaker which continues to shape the direction of the audio industry to this day. Much sought after by cognoscenti, it has been unashamedly designed with the serious audiophile in mind, not only because of its size and shape but also because of its active design – the crossover network is positioned between the pre and power amplifiers.

The Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus has been greeted worldwide as an outstanding loudspeaker which will shape the direction of the audio industry well into the new millennium. Already sought after by cognoscenti, it has been unashamedly designed with the serious audiophile in mind, not only because of its size and shape but also because of its active design – the crossover network is positioned between the pre and power amplifiers. This means that a full Nautilus system needs one stereo pre-amplifier and eight monobloc or four stereo power amplifiers per pair (amplifiers of 100 watts upwards are recommended, with 500 watts being the optimum for the low frequency drive unit).

		Nautilus™ symbolises all the qualities of innovation, dedication and love of music which have inspired Bowers & Wilkins engineers, designers and production teams ever since our company was established over 40 years ago. The Nautilus offers a unique chance to hear music exactly as recorded: detailed, vibrantly alive, full of power and unhindered by speaker distortion or cabinet diffraction.
		Most Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers use aluminium dome tweeters. The combination of lightness and rigidity they offer means that they capture the subtleties of music, such as delicate brush strokes across the surface of a cymbal with amazing accuracy. Our latest aluminium tweeters feature a ‘crowned’ voice-coil bobbin and a silver-plated pole piece, extending the bandwidth well over an octave above the limits of human hearing, and rendering a separate ‘supertweeter’ quite unnecessary.
		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. Bowers & Wilkins’ 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.