New Bowers and Wilkins 800 D4 (2021)

High-end British speaker maker Bowers & Wilkins has unveiled the fourth generation of its flagship 800 Series Diamond lineup, designated “D4.” As the name indicates, all 800 Series Diamond speakers feature a lab-grown diamond-dome tweeter. According to B&W, diamond’s unique stiffness-to-weight ratio makes it the ideal tweeter material. Aside from that, nearly everything else about the 800 Series D4 models has been updated. On the outside, the cabinet design includes a new cast-aluminum top section, replacing the previous wood, to provide even greater stiffness and thus cabinet quietness. In addition, all floorstanding models offer a downfacing bass port that fires onto a new aluminum plinth with a constrained-layer steel damping sheet that better controls unwanted resonances. The iconic tweeter-on-top features a new, more elongated, tube-loaded enclosure milled from a single block of solid aluminum that is decoupled from the rest of the speaker in two locations rather than one. Also, the smalle