SOUND BITES
B&W 600 SERIES ANNIVERSARY EDITION
B&W has released the seventh generation of its venerable 600 Series, which was launched a quarter of a century ago. This means that the new 600 Series Anniversary Edition is the company’s second-longest continuously-available line.
Despite many corporate and manufacturing changes over the years, Bowers & Wilkins still develops and manufactures all its key components in-house and gradually ‘trickles down’ technologies originally developed for flagship models to its lower-priced speakers. “This approach has consistently allowed 600 Series models to deliver better quality components and technologies than any comparable competitor, delivering sound quality rivalling that of far more expensive speakers,” says John Martin, of B&W Australia. The new 600 Series Anniversary Edition range not only offers component and technological improvements over the sixth version of the 600 Series, introduced in 2018, it also adds new Oak and Red Cherry finishes to the existing matte black and matte white finishes.
The improvements include upgraded crossovers in every model plus the addition of new and improved bypass capacitors made by component specialist Mundorf.
The line-up includes the 603 S2 Anniversary Edition speakers at $2,999 per pair (floorstanders with a Decoupled Double Dome aluminium tweeter, a 150mm FST Continuum cone midrange driver and two 165mm paper-cone bass drivers), the 606 S2 Anniversary Edition speakers at $1,299 per pair (stand-mount with a DDD aluminium tweeter and a 165mm Continuum cone mid/ bass driver) and the 607 S2 Anniversary Edition speakers at $999 per pair (stand-mount with the DDD tweeter and a 130mm Continuum Cone mid/bass driver.
Stands are optionally available for both stand-mount models, plus there’s a matching centre-channel speaker for home theatre applications (HTM6 S2 Anniversary Edition, at $899). The three subwoofers available are the extant ASW610XP ($1,999), ASW610 ($1,099) and ASW608 ($849) which are not available in the new finishes, only in matte black or matte white.
For more information, contact B&W Australia on (02) 9196 8990 or at www.bowerswilkins.com/en-au
DS AUDIO GRAND MASTER
DS Audio has released its Grand Master optical phono cartridge. It says that as well as being its third generation of optical cartridges, it’s a completely new design with a different optical system that now uses completely independent LEDs and photo-detectors for the left and right channels. One result of this is that the company has been able to increase the cartridge output voltage from 40mV to 70mV and improve channel separation, including a 10dB improvement at high frequencies, as well as dramatically increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
“The implementation of independent left and of Absolute HiEnd, which distributes DS Audio in Australia. “These new plates are not only significantly reduced in size, but also much lighter, thanks to being made of pure beryllium, rather than aluminium as they were previously. At just 0.74 milligrams, the weight of the plates is now less than one-tenth that of the generator parts of a conventional moving-coil cartridge.” In order to reduce mass even more, the Grand Master is the first DS Audio cartridge to use a diamond cantilever.
