Warwick Acoustics Aperio

It’s a brave company that launches a £20,000 headphone as only its second product – and an electrostatic too. Yet more remarkable: that company isn’t Chinese but British!

- Keith Howard

Electrostatic headphones are like royalty: rarefied enough to assume an aura that rivets mass attention. In the case of Warwick Acoustics’ Aperio, it’s not just its operating principle that catches the eye and sparks interest but its price too: at £20,000 this isn’t the most expensive headphone/amplifier combination ever seen but it’s up there with the very few daring to dangle a price tag greater than that of a family car.

Warwick Acoustics, it must be said, makes considerable effort to justify the cost of the Aperio beyond promises of transcendent sound quality. Not only is it supplied with a versatile DAC/amplifier (no small energiser box here), it also comes with special USB and Ethernet cables (2m and 3.1m in length respectively) and a massive, wheeled Peli case for storage and transportation. The whole thing weighs over 20kg when loaded and is never going to pass as a listening room presentation case – but the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would quail at it.

IMPACT DRIVERS

Looking at the Aperio can induce a sense of déjà vu. Isn’t this the Sonoma Acoustics Model One (M1) [HFN Feb ’18]? No, it isn’t – but the visual similarity is no surprise given that the Model One uses drivers built in Warwick Acoustics’ Nuneaton factory. (Final assembly of the Model One takes place in Asia whereas the Aperio is assembled here in the UK.)

What distinguishes the two most importantly is that the drivers used in the Model One are single-sided, whereas those in the Aperio are symmetrical, push-pull designs. Expressed in loudspeaker terms (assuming that your memory stretches back to the 1950s), the Model One is a Janszen tweeter to the Aperio’s Quad ELS.