Castle Windsor Duke Loudspeakers

Description

The Windsor Duke is equipped with an 8″ woofer, purposely-developed together with a 28mm textile dome tweeter, to perform seamlessly in a classic bookshelf / monitor styled cabinet.

The drive units have all been engineered from the ground up, using cast alloy components, yet retaining the essential character through the use of new woven Polypropylene cones and glass-fibre voice coils.

The cabinet work is, as you would expect from a product bearing the Castle name, first class. The hand-selected, book-matched pairs of veneers are sourced from the original suppliers to ensure continuity in the Castle legacy.

Our dedicated ‘handfinished’ team is trained to deliver the highest quality ‘furnituregrade’ finishes and build. No two pairs are the same!

To ensure the Windsor Series is truly something special, Castle has harnessed the talents of world- renowned speaker designer Karl-Heinz Fink and his Fink Audio team. Built over decades, Fink’s track record of developing excellent loudspeakers is exceptional, He was recently described as “today’s most influential speaker designer” when presented with the Outstanding Contribution Award at the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2022 – a fitting tribute to the success of his designs.

The frequency unit follows the classical formula of a high-consistency exposed polyester dome, with a pressure equalised Ferrite magnet system and a stable metal front plate. No Ferrofluid is used in the tweeter in order to guarantee the highest possible dynamic range. This also keeps the resonant frequency below 800Hz, for optimum performance.

The treble unit’s voice coil has a diameter of 28mm and is equipped with a copper cap on the pole piece of the magnet. This reduces distortion and intermodulation, delivering a tangible increase in audible detail at very high frequencies.

The Polypropylene used in the cones is precision cut into thin strips, woven back into a sort of fabric and comes together again to form a solid foil. This foil gets pressed into the final shape and then cut to size.

This is a much more complex way of creating a polypropylene cone, but it has significant sonic benefits. The process creates a material with different properties of rigidity, at different directions between the voice coil and the surround. This helps to minimise resonances, which produces a flatter response curvea desired characteristic of any drive unit designed for high-performance audio.

The resulting cones, with a diameters of 200mm, feature surrounds fashioned from low-hysteresis rubber which will not deteriorate over time.

Specifications