B&W WM2 - More than just a weather proof monitir!

The excellent B&W WM2

For a while, the best B&W budget speaker has been a second hand B&W 601 S2/3, however the WM-2 is a real contender for the best of the small speakers B&W make.

Let me tell you more about this hidden gem.
Whilst sold as a weatherproof outdoor speaker, the WM-2 is very capable indoors.
Its tweeter is not a aluminium dome nautilus tube design, its the cheaper plastic tweeter that B&W use with their 'solid' series & the LM-1 etc

However, the midbass units in the WM2 are not the same as the LM1 or VM1, despite the similar naming initials.
The LM/VM use a 4 inch paper cone speaker.
The WM2 uses a 5 inch kevlar re-inforced cone that is similar to the newer 600 series!
And this makes a lot of difference.. in base but more importantly in midrange vocals.

You get from the WM2 the same warm vocals that you get from a 600 or a 601.
The speaker cone can be pushed a bit without risking distortion.
I gave it a +6db of bass increment & the results were excellent - it handled perfectly.

The speaker has a small footprint but is ported - & that tells us that the driver is capable of moving a lot of air, thus a reflex design was chosen & it worked well.

The outer rounded rectangle appearance make the speaker look like something designed to hang outside a shop or in an open ground.
But if you are happy to live with industrial looking speaker brackets, the rest of the design is quite sleek & very usable at home.

My only feedback is that they should have paired it with a slightly better tweeter, so that the treble was more smooth & went higher up.
It appears this speaker needs to be crossed over lower than other 600 series speakers, & this does seem to affect the sound.
Perhaps changing the crossover frequencies slightly would have made some difference but I wont comment on that as I am not the designer - Im sure they did their best with the componenets.

I also wish they would have release the WM2 under a sibling model, like IM2 - same speaker but with slightly better outer materials, or colours even.
Its simple plastic housing does tend to give away some of the sophistication B&W customers would get with speakers like the LM or VM, & definitely with the 600 series.

But other than that, get a WM2 - it is currently the best small speaker by Bowers & Wilkins.