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We’re seen a fair few quirky speaker designs in our day, but not since The Flintstones have we seen audio speakers made from stone.
Bowers & Wilkins have come up with a design for their Signature Diamond speakers that encases the tweeter in a marble housing.
The company says marble works because it’s stable, weighty and rigid. It supposedly provides an acoustically inert platform that allows the tweeters to produce fine detail, pushing resonances outside the audible spectrum without suffering interference from vibrations in the tweeter housing.
According to the B&W, it’s only recently that machines have been developed that are capable of accurately — and repeatedly — grinding and polishing marble blocks into the exact sculpted form required for the acoustical design.
While the shape of each housing is identical, the patterns and colourings of each block of marble used are unique. The Signature Diamond cabinets are finished in either White or “Wakame” and different types of marble have been sourced for the tweeters to complement these finishes.
The stone speakers also come with a heavy-weight price tag — the Signature Diamond has a recommended retail price of AU$28,000 per pair.
