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?