B&W LM1s as surrounds with 6 series speakers

Reviewing the LM1s as fronts as well as surrounds

The B&W LM1 may very well be a great starting point for hifi on a budget, but frankly if you're on a budget & want fronts, get the inexpensive B&W 601 S2/S3. Please read my last post here to get some more details on that.

If you want to place them on the wall, direction them, & want a great overall speaker with a tiny foot print that doesnt sound like a tatterbox bose satellite, then the LM1 is probably your best choice.

Its not that the the LM1s wont do a good job as fronts, but the 601 will outperform as its a true full range front bookshelf rather than a small speaker that was basically designed for those that have to work with smaller sapces & cant have its bigger brothers. So LM1 would be your only real choice if you couldnt afford the smaller 686 bookshelf (which I havent owned but have been impressed by)

The LM1 has a few advantages:

1) Easy to mount & orient with built in rotating mount cum stand mechanism

Though its not impossible to buy speaker mounts that can do the same, its just nice to have a speaker that comes with one of these, so that you dont need to make holes or modifications of any kind & can simply find a suitable place to hang them off.
The wall mounts rotate to become stands, so any flat surface is ok, & you can rotate them for a beautiful lineup to the listener ear.

2) Extremely good bass for what is a small speaker

Do not under-estimate this baby. Those small drive units have a fair bit of power. They will like your grunty amp dont you worry, & they will deliver that low end nicely. The mid bass is not as smooth, but the deep end of the bass is superb & clean. Yes, you will need a sub when you get serious, but my point is that this speaker isnt a clatter box tweeter inside a piece of plastic. This is a REAL speaker!
It doent roll-off as nicely with a small sub like the b&w asw608 that I was using, but since I wasnt going to use them for fronts on the long run, it didnt matter too much.

3) Beautiful timbre matching with the new 6 series speakers - even the floor stander 683/684!

Not often will a little bookshelf do justice to a front thats way out of its league. This little bookshelf is a different story. In HT setups, for almost any movie, the LM1 is more than adequate with a well crossed over sub. For hifi music, a bigger bookshelf is slightly better, but not by a lot.
Its nice when your surrounds dont sound a world apart to your fronts & center.

If you can afford it & have the sapce to use the 685/686/601 for surrounds, then they are definitely better, its all about what you can have in the LM1 for its small size.

I havnt yet auditioned the new M-1 & Lm-1 side by side, but I doubt they will be as good at delivering the bottom end. Most people have agreed the M1 is a tatty speaker. I hope it doesnt remind me of something from a typical Sony 5.1 HT in a box stuff.
Do you own a M-1? What do you think? What amp/sub do you use?

B&W 601 S2 vs B&W 685

Bowers and Wilkins DM 601 S2 S3 vs 685

If you are out for a bookshelf, & dont know if the Bowers & Wilkins 601 is a good buy compared to the newer 685 then I have good news.
Get the cheaper older speakers!!

I would go so far as to say that even if you can afford the new 685s, save the dosh & buy the older 601 S2/S3.
If you have a good floor stander like the 683/684 & want to use the 685s for surrounds, the you might have some marginal benefit in going with 685 as there is the probability of better timbre matchting, but I personally doubt you would tell them apart in surround use anyway...

Advantages of the older B&W 601:

1) Better bass

I think its the bigger cone that helps, but the bass out of the 601 sounds quite smooth.
It has a particularly nice roll over with the B&W ASW 608 subwoofer.
If you're using bookshelves for mains, I highly recommend the ASW 608, its one awesome sub & often a tad under-estimated due to its small size, but dont let that micro footprint fool you.
Have a read of my article on the Bowers & Wilkins ASW608 sub woofer here.

2) Better Vocals

Contrary to what a moajority of reviews seem to find, I felt the newer speakers actually had an unpleasant sharpness in the vocals. You want frank sinatra to sound crisp, but not shrill, if you get what I mean. The older speakers were significantly mellow & had the signature bowers and wilkins sound of warmth that we usually like. Maybe the older bigger cone was more mellow, but there is definitely a lot about the new 685 vocals that I wasnt impressed with.

4) Cheaper to buy now!

The older speakers are cheap, & being quite under-rated are often selling for a couple of hundred dollars on trademe & eBay. They are the best bargain hifi speaker for anyone on a budget, or new to hifi.

I cant say if the 601 S3 woulc be the same as the S2, but given they both share the newer tweeter & what looks like the same bass/mid drivers, I would hope they sound similar.
The 601 Series 1 has older drivers & I havt tried those.

Any of you folks tried the 601 with the golden tweeters? Are they as good as the newer 601 Series 2 & series 3?

Let me know what you think, & what amp you were using.

3d printing prices - shapeways vs ponoko vs iMaterialise vs sculpteo

Comparing the price to 3d print a tiny 20mm x 14xmm x17mm model

Just a quick post as a heads up for those that want to know which service is overall the cheapest.
I havnt tried any of them, just researched it so giving you the info without you having to sign up & upload models, & check out & go through all that jazz, & then get rubbish emails for the rest of your lives potentially.. kidding.

All shipping costs are to New Zealand. Currency is mostly USD, unless otherwise specified.

I do my own platic 3d printing so Im mostly interested in metals or other materials, more specifically shiny glossy silvery looking ones.


www.shapeways.com - $12 for a tiny gold coloured glossy metal part, sounds a lot but its the cheapest service provider overall & even has the option of pure silver, not bad.
The white plastic version was only $2.5
Shipping $20, but its practically flat no matter how many small items I added to checkout, weird, but well, it prboably has the brains to check weight etc

www.ponoko.com - cant make small stuff from metal!

http://i.materialise.com/ - no login necessary yay! - but 12.5 freakin Euros for white plastic are you kidding me?! They also provide pure gold but coudlnt price it on the spot, interesting if you wanted something made to that standard.

www.sculpteo.com - $8 for white plastic - shipping costs $30!


Thats it folks.

Any of you out there tried these services?
Is the cheapest of them, shapeways good enough, or is iMaterialise something out of this world??

Happy Shopping :)