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Hello all,
Happy turkey day! Ive been reading your forum for a while now and it has sparked an interest in me again. When I was younger my father and I used to build alot of different speaker systems for the fun of it. We got into crossover components, wiring point to point on everything including our amps and preamps.
Tube equipment. Siver wire from jewely shops and different capacitors, resistors and coils for our speakers. My fathers system was an old Dynaco power amp and preamp. plus all his room accusstics. His system was just a two channel system but the imaging and spread was so amazing you would swear it was surround sound. My system was a Sonic Frontiers tube amp, Conrad johnson preamp and home built speakers that IMO didnt sound as good as his. Since then I set aside
my equipment and purchased a Denon AVR3200 recever and used it with my homebrew speakers for a few years to enjoy the media content with DVDs.
About 8 months ago I purchased B&W 603 s3 mains, LCR 600 s3 center, ASW 600 sub and the dm 600 s3 rears. These are pleasent sounding speakers and I expected good design in the crossovers and cabnet quality. I am aware of the artical published by B&W and thier designed crossovers. Out of curiousity I decided to take a look at them. There are a few things that I was not to impressed with. The first was they choose to use clip ons for the internal wiring instead of soilders them. Also I expected to see point to point wiring. Instead they are mounted on pcb. They also have what appears to be a heavy gauge zip cord wire for the internals which could be upgraded. This lead me to question the quality of the capacitors being used in the crossover. I understand that these arent the top of the line speakers but for the price one pays for them I was hoping for a little more. Dont get me wrong, I do think they are nice speakers but they could have done better. The caps in the crossovers are 4.7uf and 10uf. I had some Wonder Cap capacitors laying around
so I replaced them. On the 4.7uf I could only come up with 4.8uf with the wonder caps but tried them any way. Just by replacing the caps made a huge difference in the sound quality. Also I solderd the wiring instead of the clips.
The imaging improved alot and the depth and width of the sound stage increased quite a bit. Im also biwiring them. The center chanel also became less muddy in the sound. The construction quality of the drivers are very good. With the improvment in sound quality I got from the front mains and center I plan on doing the rears also to keep them matched. I wasnt impressed with the quality of the rears as they are made from a plastic compound as opposed to the fronts drivers which are metal composits.
Overall given marketing concerns and cost of mass production I do feel these are good speaker compaired to other brands. Any thoughs welcome.
Fritz
Happy turkey day! Ive been reading your forum for a while now and it has sparked an interest in me again. When I was younger my father and I used to build alot of different speaker systems for the fun of it. We got into crossover components, wiring point to point on everything including our amps and preamps.
Tube equipment. Siver wire from jewely shops and different capacitors, resistors and coils for our speakers. My fathers system was an old Dynaco power amp and preamp. plus all his room accusstics. His system was just a two channel system but the imaging and spread was so amazing you would swear it was surround sound. My system was a Sonic Frontiers tube amp, Conrad johnson preamp and home built speakers that IMO didnt sound as good as his. Since then I set aside
my equipment and purchased a Denon AVR3200 recever and used it with my homebrew speakers for a few years to enjoy the media content with DVDs.
About 8 months ago I purchased B&W 603 s3 mains, LCR 600 s3 center, ASW 600 sub and the dm 600 s3 rears. These are pleasent sounding speakers and I expected good design in the crossovers and cabnet quality. I am aware of the artical published by B&W and thier designed crossovers. Out of curiousity I decided to take a look at them. There are a few things that I was not to impressed with. The first was they choose to use clip ons for the internal wiring instead of soilders them. Also I expected to see point to point wiring. Instead they are mounted on pcb. They also have what appears to be a heavy gauge zip cord wire for the internals which could be upgraded. This lead me to question the quality of the capacitors being used in the crossover. I understand that these arent the top of the line speakers but for the price one pays for them I was hoping for a little more. Dont get me wrong, I do think they are nice speakers but they could have done better. The caps in the crossovers are 4.7uf and 10uf. I had some Wonder Cap capacitors laying around
so I replaced them. On the 4.7uf I could only come up with 4.8uf with the wonder caps but tried them any way. Just by replacing the caps made a huge difference in the sound quality. Also I solderd the wiring instead of the clips.
The imaging improved alot and the depth and width of the sound stage increased quite a bit. Im also biwiring them. The center chanel also became less muddy in the sound. The construction quality of the drivers are very good. With the improvment in sound quality I got from the front mains and center I plan on doing the rears also to keep them matched. I wasnt impressed with the quality of the rears as they are made from a plastic compound as opposed to the fronts drivers which are metal composits.
Overall given marketing concerns and cost of mass production I do feel these are good speaker compaired to other brands. Any thoughs welcome.
Fritz
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