The pursuit of perfection

The breakthrough moment for the 801 came when EMI adopted it as its reference monitor at Abbey Road Studios, leading many other facilities around the world to follow suit. A contemporary picture shows a pair of 801s – all 47kg apiece of them! – mounted on tall open-frame stands in the studio, and this co-operation between Abbey Road and Bowers & Wilkins – and the ongoing installation of successive generations of 800 Series speakers – continues to this day, as does their use in many other world-leading recording facilities.

The 1980s saw an even greater focus on research and development at Bowers & Wilkins, with the celebrated Steyning Research Establishment (or SRE) being founded just a year after the 801 was launched, and going on to form the backbone of the company’s R&D for almost four decades, before being replaced with the much larger Southwater Research Establishment – so still SRE! – in 2019.

Steyning was always about pushing the limits of speaker engineering, and from its work came innovations redefining the 800 Series. For example, the Matrix 801, launched in 1987, tackled the entire subject of cabinet rigidity and vibration with an internal bracing structure formed from a lattice of interlocking spars, stiffening the entire enclosure in three dimensions. Still recognisably an 801 speaker, although now with a front-venting bass port in place, the Matrix 801 would go on to set the blueprint for the construction of all Bowers & Wilkins speakers, in which use of the Matrix system is widespread. Oh, and the bass driver was growing: it was now a full 30cm unit, giving the speaker low-end extension down to 20Hz. As one reviewer commented, it was like having ‘a pair of speakers with perfectly aligned subwoofers built-in’.

While the Matrix 800 went through a series of iterations in the following decade, not least including its development into a complete speaker series from the little standmount 805 through to the flagship 801, even more radical changes were being plotted behind the closed doors in Steyning. A hint of what was going on – well, a jaw-droppingly spectacular hint – of what was happening arrived in the form of the sculptural Nautilus in 1993, its form reflecting the concept of damped tubes to control the output from the rear of its drivers, the bass section curling like the aquatic creature from which it takes its name.

A design classic? Definitely, and one that’s still being made by hand in very limited numbers, alongside the 800 Series Diamond speakers in the Dale Road factory in Worthing, UK. But Nautilus was more than just a striking one-off: the technology behind it was to influence the design of the company’s whole range, as was evidenced when the Nautilus 800 Series appeared five years later.

Yes, the speakers were recognisably descendants of the original – but only just: the main enclosure gained a softer, curved form, complete with a downward-venting bass port, and on its shoulders sat a near-ball-shaped head containing the midrange driver, seemingly hunkering down into the bass unit and made from Marlan – another of those materials more commonly found in the construction industry: think all-in-one ceramic-look sinks and drainers.

Atop that was a separate tweeter pod, closer resembling the ‘Tweeter-on-Top’ pods of the 1970s, but here elongated out to the rear to form a ‘Nautilus tube’. Also presaging what was to come later, the speaker sat on a hefty cast-metal base, down onto which the Flowport vented, and inside which were the crossover components, suitably isolated from the powerful bass on offer from the paper/Kevlar composite 38cm bass unit of the Nautilus 801, or the dual 25cm bass drivers of the flagship Nautilus 800.

By now, the speakers were somewhat heavier than the original 801, the Nautilus 800 being 125kg apiece and heading a complete range, all the way down to the compact Nautilus 805, the slender Nautilus SCM1, and a brace of matching centre speakers for multichannel use – and all with that Nautilus tube tweeter.

Next up was another remarkable breakthrough: a tweeter dome formed by chemical deposition of diamond material, the Steyning team having identified this as the optimum tweeter material for rigidity and lightness. These diamond tweeters were so revolutionary in their performance – offering a first breakup frequency of over 70kHz – that they gave their name to the original 800 Series Diamond of 2005, which were supplanted in 2010 by a range of upgraded ‘D2’ specification models.

Then, in 2015, it was time for the next major breakthrough: the new 800 Series Diamond, or D3 – announced that ‘From drive units to cabinet geometry, every major component has been rethought and reinvented.’

In fact, everything, give or take the odd screw, was all-new. The ‘Turbine’ head housing the midrange driver was now made from solid metal, while the tweeter ‘pod’ was also milled from solid aluminium, while the cabinets of the uppermost models – the 800, 802 and 803 – took on a much more sculptural shape. It’s formed using the Worthing factory’s ‘Reverse Wrap’ technology, in which multiple layers of beech are pressed together under heat to form the front baffle and sides of the enclosure in one piece for greater stiffness, then joined at the rear with a metal spine, further bracing the cabinet (along with the internal Matrix) and acting as a heatsink for the crossover components mounted to it.