Man I've really hit some nerves here... "most highly-guarded speaker manufacturing secrets in the world" and "speaker medium is protected like national security," there's a combination of words I never thought I would hear. We are talking about mass produced 3" kevlar speakers...not patriot missiles.
Anyway, the hope of my original post was that someone had already tried their luck on these speakers and they could respond saying either "yes, these are good" or "no, they are no better than HP paper cone speakers"...not get trolled.
No, the comments are just stupid, so stupid to the level they deserve to be corrected. Bowers and Wilkins is one of the most highly regarded manufactures in the entire world of speakers, one of the pioneers of audio. The speakers specifically referenced by the poster are not made of Kevlar, and actually are kept secret about as much as a national security secret. If you watch the news lately, it’s probably kept better the national secrets. It took them over 10 years to even develop the material used, let alone how they construct the speaker with it. So, when people laugh like some Chinese company is producing replicas that are actually able to replicate the originals. Sound quality the fax point to something otherwise.
The material is highly proprietary as is how it’s constructed and manufactured. That’s not really an opinion that’s just the facts. So I think it’s very clear that the replicas look alike, but don’t sound alike. Bowers and Wilkins absolutely protect their proprietary research and patents like a watchdog and there is no way you can get on eBay and buy their product at a fraction of the price with some Chinese seller. They would sue them into oblivion.
I guess if you’re not an audio file and you’re not reach Milyer with speaker manufactures that sell six-figure systems to customers every day it probably seems pretty silly that a speaker seems to be such a great mystery and a garden secret. The fact is these companies take it extremely seriously into them it is as important as national security and it’s protected as such.