An extremely important line for Bowers & Wilkins, the new 700 S2 Series of loudspeakers, has been announced for imminent release. The new 700 Series replaces the company’s highly successful CM line, with the new speakers inheriting many of the state-of-the-art technologies used in the flagship 800 Series Diamond.
“Studio sound comes home” says Bowers & Wilkins when it refers to the new 700 S2 offerings and to that end the new speakers will feature an armoury of the company’s many proprietary technologies. For starters, there’s the exceptional Continuum woven composite midrange driver – as used in the 800 Series Diamond – while the range will also adopt a bespoke paper-foam-Aerofoil sandwich version of the Aerofoil bass drivers which are renowned for their high power handling, high output, low distortion and outstanding performance. The Continuum driver upgrades the CM drivers’ zinc basket with a stiffer aluminium one while the driver also features a tuned mass damping technique to further reduce vibrational distortion making for a cleaner, more accurate performance.
Debuting is the ‘Carbon Dome’ tweeter which, as John Martin Director of Sales Bowers & Wilkins Australia explains, “is a design delivering sweeter, cleaner high-frequency performance even further up the audible bandwidth than the aluminium Double Dome tweeter previously used in both CM Series and 600 Series. The Carbon Dome is the best-performing ‘non-Diamond’ tweeter that Bowers & Wilkins has ever produced.”
The new Carbon Dome tweeter features a 30-micron thick aluminium diaphragm which has been reinforced with a vapour deposited – PVD or Physical Vapour Deposition as Bowers & Wilkins calls it – coating of carbon. A further 300-micron ring of carbon which matches the dome’s profile is then added. The structure is said to provide an extremely stiff dome with very low distortion and a very high break-up mode at 47kHz well beyond the critical band. Improvements on the tweeter housing have also been implemented with the two top 700 Series speakers featuring a ‘Tweeter-on-Top’ low resonance decoupled housing milled from solid aluminium as first used in the 800 flagships.
The 700 S2 range starts with the 130mm 2-way 707 S2 (AU$1499) which is followed by the 165mm 2-way 706 S2 (AU$2199) and the top-of the range standmount 705 S2 165mm Tweeter-on-Top (AU$3499). The floorstanders start with the 704 S2 twin 130mm bass 3-way (AU$3799) followed by the 703 S2 twin 165mm bass 3-way (AU$4699) and culminates with the 702 S2 triple 165mm 3-way (AU$6500) with external tweeter housing.
Also new are two centre channel speakers in the HTM72 S2 (AU$1199), a twin 130mm bass 2-way entry point, and the HTM71 S2, a larger twin 165mm bass with 100mm Continuum driver (AU$1799). The DB4S active subwoofer is added to the range featuring a 10-inch/250mm Aerofoil driver, a 1000 watt Hypex Class-D amplifier, DSP ‘Dynamic EQ’ and automatic room correction software and App-based smart device control. The new DB4S 700 S2 Series subwoofer will be priced at AU$2799 each. The FS-700 S2 dedicated speaker stand, in black or silver, rounds out the collection and retails for AU$799 a pair.
The new 700 S2 Series is available in three finishes – gloss black, satin white and Rosenut veneer. The new 700 S2 Series will be available from selected Bowers & Wilkins dealers around Australia from October 2017.
Australian Distributor: Bowers & Wilkins Australia
+61 2 9196 8990
www.bowers-wilkins.com
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