B&W’s 686 Mini Monitor Exposed!

          Everyone knows B&W makes among the best speakers in the world. B&W is used at Abbey Road in London and LucasFilms in California among many major studios. They use B&W to master music and film sound because they want the most accurate picture of what is going into their product.

          Most people think you need to spend thousands to buy B&W. You can! But what about the other end of the spectrum?

          We want to show off what you get for modest money. We have stripped down the new model 686 which sells for only $480 per pair.

               Here we show the cabinet with no drivers. While not real exciting to behold, the cabinet is very important to the sound quality.     With most speaker companies the cabinet is just ½” board with a few holes in it. On the 686 you can see the front and back panels are 1” thick MDF. The side panels are ¾”. The front baffle doesn’t just have a few tiny holes to screw the drivers into. The cabinets have been mitered out precisely to accept the driver shapes and reinforce their structures. The machine screws for the woofer secure into t-nuts, not to just the cabinet, like most other speakers. They even provide a special opening for the substantial cables that run to the tweeter.

               Here you see the back view of the 686. Note that B&W allows the bi-wire or bi-amp option. It has dual gold plated binding posts to accept nice banana plugs. It has B&W’s Flowport port with dimples to prevent chuffing- which is common with virtually every competitor. It comes with a mounting bracket for flexible placement.

        This is the face of B&W’s one inch aluminum dome Nautilus tweeter. It has a smooth surface for linear motion and smooth sound.  Note the poly ring surround around the tweeter. It absorbs any propensity for the metal dome to be bright because it drinks up edge reflections.

       Here’s the back of the Nautilus tweeter. Note the tube. It starts out fairly large near the back of the tweeter diaphragm but ascends to a smaller dimension as it goes away from the diaphragm. The Nautilus tube drinks up the back wave so there’s no back splash of bright sound entering your listening field.

              Here’s the 5” Kevlar mid/woofer driver. Note the fixed bullet at the center of the Kevlar driver. This insures that the driver moves in a linear fashion as it pulses. Kevlar itself is a more rigid, controlled material than plastic or paper- used by most companies. Everyone else just has a dust cap glued into place. Using the fixed bullet is a sure fire way to control the linear motion of the driver. If it doesn’t move in a linear motion it will have more distortion.

              Here’s the rear of the 5” Kevlar driver. Note the large cast frame used in the driver frame. Especially up near the mounting point of the cabinet- the driver is solid as can be! Also note that the cast frame is very open in the rear and does not create back splash off the driver’s cone. Stamped drivers used by competitors have wider support flanges which make for more “hands cupped mouth” sound. The magnet is extremely sizeable for this size of driver! Most 5” speakers use magnet structures 50% of this size!

         (Stamped driver)

Why doesn’t everyone have speakers like this? Because most companies don’t even build their own speakers. They just buy them from vendors! B&W builds this entire product and thus has control of all the details. When you put all this together, you get a very attractive speaker with great sound, for only $480 per pair!