Bowers & Wilkins 685 vloerspeaker

For hi-fi or home cinema in small to medium-sized rooms, you need a loudspeaker that doesn’t take up floor area, but whose sound can still command the space. You’ll find the 685, which can sit on a shelf, table, stand or wall-mount, an inspired choice.

Its 165mm 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.