Small, agile, high-performance speakers are something of an English tradition, one in which Bowers & Wilkins has played a full part. But there’s never been one quite like this.

The B&W XT2 features an immensely rigid, one-piece extruded aluminum enclosure carrying a top-mounted Nautilus™ tube loaded aluminum dome tweeter and a Flowport™ loaded Kevlar® cone bass/midrange driver. The small size of the XT2 combined with its very high performance drivers and, thanks to the rigidity of curved aluminum, its complete lack of cabinet coloration, produces an accurate and transparent speaker capable of revealing the subtlest detail from either music or movies.

The XT2 is perfectly at home in a conventional stereo system or as either main or surround speakers in a home theater system. The addition of a PV1 active subwoofer in either case can turn an XT2-based system into something else again: a wide bandwidth, high-power wolf in sheep's clothing.

This compact yet might speakers can be mounted on the wall with the included adjustable wall bracket, and an optional FS-XT floor stand is also available. In either location the XT2 can provide genuine, critical monitor performance, with the unique benefit of a contemporary and stylish satin polished aluminum aesthetic.

Some of B&W’s cutting-edge technologies in this XT Series speaker include:

Kevlar
The midrange is where the real musical action is invariably found, and a smooth midband is an invaluable loudspeaker quality. Enter Kevlar. It’s been B&W’s cone material of choice since 1974, and with good reason. The basic woven fabric is first impregnated with a stiffening resin that cures during the cone forming process. The cone is then further treated with a polymer coat, which seals the fibers and adds damping. The result is a semi-flexible cone, which exhibits a peculiar style of break-up behavior, not found in more conventional materials, that maintains a more constant dispersion pattern at all frequencies in its range and transmits far fewer delayed, time-smearing sounds to the listener. Not only does it deliver a cleaner sound, it can do so to a wider group of listeners.

Nautilus Tapering Tube
The sound of silence. Not all sound generated by speaker drive units is good sound. The kind that emerges from the back of a working driver, into a conventional box cabinet, can bounce around and make a mess of the good sound coming out of the front. B&W’s trailblazing Nautilus™ speaker found a way around boxes. Tapering tubes filled with absorbent wadding soaked up the wayward sound energy and reduced resonances to an insignificant minimum.

Nautilus™ Tapering Tubes are fitted to nearly all B&W speakers, even when they’re not visible to the eye. Sound is channeled through a hollow pole magnet, away from the diaphragm, and disappears into the tail. So all the sound you hear is good sound.

Tweeter on Top
B&W's tweeter on top technology has two benefits. It avoids the situation with normal cabinet construction, where sound waves from the tweeter not only radiate towards the listener but also travel along the baffle surface towards the cabinet edges. When sound waves meet sharp cabinet edges they re-radiate (a process known as diffraction) and, due to the time delay, interfere with and time-smear the sound coming directly from the drive unit. Having the tweeter separate from the main cabinet also allows it to be set back and time-aligned with the acoustic centre of the bass/midrange cone, which is located behind the plane of the front baffle. The effects of this improvement in time-coherence are greater clarity and the formation of a more convincing three-dimensional image.