It sounded like a very glamorous photo shoot. Meet at 10.00 AM in West London. A magazine is shooting the Jaguar XF with its Bowers & Wilkins in-car audio system alongside a pair of our flagship Nautilus loudspeakers.

Nobody mentioned it was in an un-used underground car park, and I had to help carry a pair Nautilus speakers down a ramp as the delivery van couldn’t fit. Still, always happy to help, and from what I saw of the photos taken this moody looking set piece is going to be well worth it. 

It was also interesting talking to the journalist who had driven the Bowers & Wilkins-equipped Jaguar for four months. “It’s the best thing about the car,” he said. “And I love this car.”

That’s quite some recommendation. Even more interesting was how many admiring glances and attentive questions the Nautilus were receiving, even though they were sitting next to an extremely classy looking motor vehicle. Okay, so the admiring glances were from motoring journalists who may have seen the Jag before, but they still made the effort to come down and check out a pair of 15 year-old speakers!

The story behind the photoshoot holds true though. The five years of development that the Steyning research department put into Nautilus provided Bowers & Wilkins with more than just a great sounding high-end speaker that looks like no other. It also provided us with technological advances that have informed every speaker we have made since, and can be found in the system that performs so well in today’s Jaguar cars.

Without Nautilus, famous Bowers & Wilkins technologies such as the Tapering Tubes that sit behind our tweeters may never have happened. And these developments are vital in what makes your speakers at home sound fantastic today.

It’s just great to see that 15 years after its launch, Nautilus is more than just a research project or a museum piece: it’s a stunning piece of audio engineering and industrial design that is still very much in demand.