Yesterday, I deliberately avoided responding to this post. That lasted about a day
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You cannot talk about B&W's R&D budget without knowing how much that company also spends on marketing, advertising, and promotion – not to mention manufacturing, distribution, and other production costs. I don't know that info, and I doubt if you do.
Suffice it to say that B&W is a very large company that relies heavily on manufacturing it's own drivers, drivers that they use exclusively on B&W's finished products. You cannot buy B&W drivers from sources that sell separate woofers, mid range drivers or tweeters made by many other companies.
To me that was a marketing decision. I think they wanted to keep their main identity, those highly recognizable yellow Kevlar drivers, theirs and theirs alone. Apparently, B&W also decided, years ago, that they not only wanted people to see those yellow Kevlar drivers, they wanted people to hear them. When those drivers weren't misbehaving, they added an edginess to the sound, often above and beyond the sound of the original instruments. That appealed to many potential buyers at first, but it eventually caused enough "listener's fatigue" that people grew tired of their speakers. People who started with the less costly 600 series either abandoned the B&W brand or moved up the line to B&W's higher priced models. This was clearly unrelated to R&D. It screams Marketing.
Drivers with woven Kevlar fiber cones suffer from loud break up noises that begin at a low frequency – low enough that a 4 kHz crossover frequency doesn't suppress that break up noise. If you've heard enough different B&W speaker models, its easy to hear that some speaker models suffer from this problem, and others do not. To my ears, most of the 600 series speakers had this problem to varying degrees depending on whether 5" or 6½" mid woofers were used. The mid price level CM or 700 series speakers dealt with this problem somewhat better. And the high priced 800 series speaker essentially eliminated the problem. They all had yellow Kevlar drivers. It probably came down to just how much money was spent on narrow trap filters in the crossovers that suppressed the break up noise. It came down to crossover complexity, part counts, and cost. B&W could have easily solved the problem by moving the crossover frequency lower. But this would have also prevented people from hearing that edgy yellow Kevlar sound that became B&W's product identity.
It always seemed to me that B&W was at least two different speaker companies. Speaker designers & engineers called the shots for the B&W 800 series, and marketing & advertising people called the shots for the other two series.
Now that B&W is under new management, it will be interesting to see what changes occur. The obvious change so far is that they have abandoned those yellow Kevlar drivers.
