BOENICKE audio writes: “The W22 is the culmination of all our experience of 30 years of loudspeaker researching and building. It is a melting pot of unique technologies you will not find in any other commercially available product. It is a radical cost-no-object instrument.”
Besides our already quite well known tuning elements, of which you of course will find here each and every one in the very best version, this speaker truly and rigorously follows function – that is why the 28 cm custom-made bass-midrange driver is tilted backwards. If it was aiming directly at the listener, the speaker would not be able to disappear and would sound too much in your face – this way, it is capable of disappearing like our other models and actually even more, and at the same time offering the authority, naturalness and brutal rapidness only large diaphragms can produce. Since it acts as a bend-mode radiator, with rising frequency the acoustical center gets smaller and smaller, and so it still has a very wide dispersion, crossing over to the exactly time-aligned tweeter seamlessly and inaudibly.
All drivers have no firm mechanical connection to the enclosure. The bass-midrange is suspended in a unique construction: In the front a leather ring holds the basket in place, in the back the wood-cone-topped magnet is centered and held in place by laser-cut and felt-dampened spokes.
The tweeter sits in its own curved massive bronze face plate and is being freely suspended by 3 thin steel ropes.
The result of this total mechanical decoupling is lack of distortion, layering, natruralness and see-thru quality not even rivalled by our other models.
As you might have noticed over the years, we never speak about the sonic merits of our designs. Now, for the first time, there is an exception: The W22 sets new standards.