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B&W makes Diamonds from marble

By Pam Carroll, CNET.com.au

We're seen a fair number of quirky speaker designs in our day, but not since The Flintstones have we seen audio speakers made from stone.

Bowers & Wilkins has come up with a design for its 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 B&W, it's only recently that machines have been developed 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 colorings 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 heavyweight price tag--a recommended retail price of S$70,000 (US$51,537.66) per pair.

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    Talkback
X4x2x0x says...
the marble making finer details in sound sounds reasonable and all, but is it really worth that much?

 
 
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