Bowers & Wilkins Prestige Nautilus

Floorstanding speaker

The striking spirals and tubes of Nautilus came from our research into making speaker drive units behave as we wanted: this Nautilus Tube™ technology, for which we won a Queen’s Award for Innovation, is now found in almost every speaker we make.

Nautilus is quite unlike a conventional box speaker: to package our unique Nautilus tubes for use in the home, our designers developed the striking, and space-efficient, spiral form from which the speaker takes its name.

We want to hear a speaker driver, not its side-effects – conventional boxes contain sound from the rear of the driver, but bring their own problems. Nautilus tapering tubes soak up wayward energy and reduce resonances to the point of insignificance.

• Features: Nautilus™ tube loading, Active crossover
• Description: 4-way tube-loaded loudspeaker system
• Drive units: 1x 300mm (12 in) aluminium cone bass, 1x 100mm (4 in) aluminium/polymer sandwich cone lower midrange, 1x 50mm (2 in) aluminium dome upper midrange, 1x 25mm (1 in) aluminium dome high-frequency
• Frequency range: -6dB at 10Hz and 25kHz
• Dispersion: Within 2dB of response on reference axis, Horizontal: over 60° arc, Vertical: over 10° arc
• Crossover frequency: 220Hz, 880Hz, 3.5kHz
• Power amplifier requirements: 4 channels per speaker, rated, 100W-300W continous into 8Ω on unclipped programme (each channel to have identical gain and phase)