Напольная акустика — Boenicke Audio W22

The W22 is a limited-production floorstanding loudspeaker built by Sven Boenicke's Swiss firm Boenicke Audio in Basel. The project began in 2020 to mark the 22nd anniversary of the brand, and Boenicke describes the model as the sum of its in-house know-how, with several features used in no other speaker it makes. Output is limited to six pairs a year, and there is no official price - each order is priced individually with the customer.

Key specs that matter

Upper frequencies come from a custom AER cone tweeter rated at 101 dB for 2.83 V at 1 m, with a carbon diaphragm on a foam surround set into a curved, powder-coated baffle of solid bell bronze. An Audax tweeter on the back panel supplies ambient output. The midrange and upper bass are handled by a custom Supravox 285 driver of 28.5 cm with a C37-lacquered cellulose cone, a paper voice coil former and a bell bronze phase plug. Below it, two 15-inch long-throw woofers in a sealed enclosure run from a 600 W Class D module with a programmable DSP. Boenicke gives efficiency figures of about 95 dB in the midrange and 96 to 100 dB in the bass, depending on room gain, and a -3 dB point near 33 Hz. Each speaker measures 38.2 cm wide, 104.2 cm high and 56.4 cm deep.

Engineering and use context

The Supravox driver works without an electrical crossover, and a proprietary network linearises acoustic phase instead. The DSP delays the two woofers so that they sit exactly one cycle behind the bass-midrange unit. Tweeter and bass-midrange driver are held in a proprietary suspension that limits the transfer of kinetic energy into the cabinet and back into the cone. The enclosure is made of acetylated Accoya or solid mahogany, with solid wood side panels chosen by the customer, and Boenicke selected Accoya because it is almost fully dimensionally stable, a property that matters more as a cabinet grows. The speaker stands on the floating Swing Base, here in the form of three rectangular towers. Internal wiring combines LessLoss coaxial cable with the in-house S3 cable, each speaker holds 16 LessLoss Firewall filters, and the rear tweeter uses a Mundorf Silver Gold Oil capacitor.

Pairing

Only the woofer section has built-in power, so an external amplifier drives the tweeters and the Supravox unit through Furutech FT-816 terminals. Boenicke designed the W22 to work with relatively low-powered amplifiers, which earlier Boenicke models did not suit as well.

Alternatives

The Boenicke W13 is a floorstanding alternative from the Basel range that also uses a DSP-controlled active bass driver.