Bowers & Wilkins 686 vloerspeaker

The smallest model in the 600 series is an incredibly versitile loudspeaker. It is an ideal bookshelf speaker for stereo in smaller rooms, but also a refined rear speaker in home theatre systems.

The 686 is the baby of the 600 Series bunch, but doesn’t lack for the technologies and features to deliver outrageously good sound in smaller room settings. Mount a pair on a wall or stand, or simply sit them on a shelf or table for a compact stereo system or as surround speakers in a home theatre set-up.

The 130mm diameter Kevlar® cone bass/midrange is based on a tried-and-trusted Bowers & Wilkins design, but its new fixed centre bullet helps to smooth the response in upper frequencies. Also, by setting the bass/midrange closer to the tweeter than in equivalent earlier speakers, we have improved the integration and vertical dispersion of sound from the two units. The Nautilus™ tube-loaded, aluminium dome tweeter, featuring a new surround material to improve spaciousness and imaging, adds needle-sharp top end all the way to 50kHz and beyond.

The improvements to the drive units in the new 600 Series make it possible, for the first time, to introduce a minimalist crossover to the range. The use of components that are fewer in number but higher in quality – hand-picked in exhaustive listening tests – reduces the degradation of the signal significantly. So, whether you’re enjoying hi-fi or home cinema, what you hear is that much closer to what was recorded.