I tried the ultra-exclusive Bentley Batur with a £25k Naim sound system

Car sound systems have come a long way since the days of tape decks, CD multi-changers, flip-out TV screens and 6x9 speakers crudely installed on the parcel shelf. Today, I always recommend car buyers tick the box for an upgraded stereo if it’s in their budget, since it improves the ownership experience on practically every drive.

These upgrades often aren’t cheap. Porsche charges almost £4,000 for the Burmester system in the latest 911, and the only way to unlock the excellent Bowers & Wilkins system in the Polestar 3 is to buy two packages of upgrades totalling £7,300.

But what if your budget is significantly larger? How far do automotive sound system upgrades go? The answer, for now at least, can be found in the Bentley Batur. An ultra-exclusive two-seat grand tourer from the company’s Mulliner division, just 18 examples of the Batur were built, plus two development vehicles retained by Bentley, including the one driven here.

All now sold, prices started at £1.65m, plus tax – and among the extensive list of optional extras was a sound system by Naim. The price? £25,000. Plus tax.

For that – more than the price of an entire Renault 5 E-Tech – you get a 20-speaker system with 2,000 watts of power. Spread throughout the cabin, the system is a comprehensive upgrade on even the Naim system offered on other models of Bentley. That original system was already the result of 10,000 hours of development, and for the Batur, Naim and Bentley poured in an extra 4,000 hours. It features upgraded front and rear woofers, plus an upgraded subwoofer, enhanced seats with active “bass shakers” to help you feel the music as much as hear it.

In all, the system comprises six tweeters (complete with cones made from aluminium and magnesium), nine mid-range speakers, two woofers, two active bass transducers and a subwoofer.

Also exclusive to the Batur are front, rear and dashboard speakers born out of the audio company’s Grande Utopia range. Built by Naim and its partner Focal, these products live in a world where headphones cost over £4,500 and a pair of floorstanding home speakers can cost anywhere from £30,000 to £220,000. Not a typo.

Guillaume Buisson-Descombes, audio OEM manager for Focal and Naim, told T3: “We like to highlight the proximity of the singers and the main instruments in front of you. They are very detailed, very present, very warm…We also like to highlight the trebles, they give detail and richness to sound.”

Any audio company will tell you how they want to deliver sound exactly as the artist intended. But they all go about it in slightly different ways, and for Naim and Focal this means creating warmth. They want your Bentley to cocoon you in a sound that is detailed and powerful, but also cosy, embracing and comfortable. Hence the emphasis on warmth.

Buisson-Descombes continued: “Our midrange gives a lot of warmth in what we call the low-midrange frequencies. Trebles also give airiness, the sensation of space…The main common target between Mulliner and us is to immerse the listener in the sound, so you really feel like you’re being wrapped up by the sound, like it is coming from everywhere and with an unlimited feeling of power.”

How does it actually sound?

Before I took delivery of the Batur, Buisson-Descombes stressed I must not, under any circumstances, use Bluetooth to stream music from my phone to the car. It downgrades the experience, he warned, and added that the wrong audio settings on my phone can kill the experience too.

Wired Apple CarPlay or Android Auto are the way to go, and while Tidal is still regarded as the best streaming app, Apple Music and Spotify are both good enough, just so long as the music is downloaded to your phone at the highest possible quality, and you use a cable instead of Bluetooth.

The result of all this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, spectacular. This is a system with as much reserve power as the twin-turbocharged W12 engine under the Bentley’s bonnet. It also possesses the same breadth of ability that can deliver a heady dose of shock-and-awe one minute, then soothe you the next.

Everything sounds great, but what really stands out is the closeness of a singer’s voice and their instruments. Cue up Adele’s Easy On Me and you could swear the piano is right there in the car with you, and when the vocals begin it is truly mesmerising. The clarity, the closeness and, yes, the warmth are all on another level. Switch to practically anything else – any track, album, artist or genre – and the Naim system is spectacular.

Crank up the volume and the two active bass shakers below the seats also make themselves known. It’s a slightly strange experience, and at first you think you’ve turned the bass up too much; that you’re about to be hit by a muddy mess of music that reduces the car to an undignified rattle. None of that happens, of course, but while the bass delivers a series of clean, precise punches to your backside, it feels a little artificial.

And the rest of the car?

Although a bespoke product of the Mulliner division, the Batur is based on the previous, none-hybridised generation of Bentley Continental GT. The wick of the now-extinct 6.0-litre W12 has been turned up to deliver 740 PS, a 0-60 mph time of 3.3 seconds and a top speed of 209 mph.

Unlike any regular Continental GT, the Batur starts in Sport mode by default. This produces an almighty eruption from the exhausts when you press the start button – which, in this particular example, is surrounded by a drive mode selector made from real gold.

The small rear seats of the Continental GT have been removed from the Batur, replaced by a beautifully tailored leather storage area for holding your equally lovely (and colour matched) bespoke luggage. More gold can be found at the top of the steering wheel and on the organ stop-style air vent controls. Bentley says this particular car was specified by a fan of Tiffany – hence the colour of the paintwork and leather. I suspect they may also be a fan of Hermès, given the bright orange leather found inside the door pockets.

It’s all rather lovely, of course. But is it worth the premium over the regular Continental GT? This question doesn’t really matter, given all 18 Baturs (plus 16 convertibles) are sold, so clearly Bentley knows its customers and how many bags of cash they're willing to part with. On the face of it, no, a Batur can’t reasonably be worth 10 times more than the car on which it is based. But such a crass answer would be to ignore the lure of exclusivity.

The Batur is so vanishingly rare that you could go to practically any event in the world – any glamorous concours, from Lake Como to Pebble Beach or The Quail – and yours will probably be the only one there.

For 18 customers that alone is worth the price of entry to Club Batur. Once you’ve handed over two million, an extra 25 grand on a sound system is probably here nor there. So yes, of course. If I were that customer I’d tick the Naim box without a second thought.