Company & Product Overview

Bowers & Wilkins has been a favorite speaker brand at Audio Advice for almost 40 years. Wow, that’s a long time! We’ve always been impressed with their natural sound that is so easy on the ears, you can listen to them for hours on end with no fatigue. You’ll find B&W speakers at Abbey Road, Skywalker Ranch, and more where recording engineers use them day in and day out for critical listening while mixing some of our favorite recordings and movie soundtracks. Their widespread use on the recording side of things certainly says a lot about their sound quality.

This great sound quality does not occur by guesswork either as B&W employees more engineers at the Steyning, UK research facility than many speaker companies have on staff for the entire company! They pioneered the use of lasers to measure speaker driver break up and continue to come up with new technologies for their speakers.

At Audio Advice we like to talk about companies who use trickle-down technology to make their less expensive products better. Bowers & Wilkins is probably the poster child for this type of company philosophy. The first step of trickle-down happens when you make something that pushes the state of the art and when doing so you learn about a new technique, new material, or both. The important step occurs when you figure out how to deploy what you learned in a far less expensive model and greatly improve the performance for the price level. Of course, if you never make anything that pushes technology to the limit, trickle-down just will not happen.

B&W, throughout their history, have developed more new ways to improve speaker technology than any speaker company we know of. From the materials they use to the design of the drivers, to the way the cabinets and driver enclosures are made, they are constantly innovating.

Today’s review is actually on a speaker model that came out in late 2014 but embodied everything B&W strives to achieve in a speaker. These have long sold out in the standard black finish, but when B&W approached us with a “deal” on the remaining white stock, we jumped on it as this was one of our favorite B&W tower speakers in recent memory. The CM8 S2 is a beautiful tower speaker from Bowers & Wilkins which is now an amazing value at the special deal we are able to sell these for.

Design & Build Quality

The CM8 S2 is a slim, three-way speaker with a dome tweeter, midrange, and two bass drivers. With the speaker cabinet being only about as wide as the drivers, it has a very tall slender look, allowing it to blend in well in most rooms. The speakers come with an optional base that adds a more substantial look to them.

The removable grill is held on with magnets which gives the front of the speaker a very clean look with the grill off. We actually think they look great with the grey grill that comes with the white speaker off. The look of the silver trim, yellow Kevlar midrange, and black woofers is just super cool and appeals to our audio geek side. Of course, the grey grill and the white satin finish have a look that will fit especially well into a contemporary environment.

Bowers & Wilkins designs all of the speakers in the UK and has most of them made overseas in a plant they own. Build quality is extremely top-notch. B&W has actually made some videos of the production process inside their plant and we have to say it’s pretty impressive. Each and every speaker goes through a rigorous series of tests to assure it exactly matches the reference standard for that model.

Features & Technology

When you first look at the tweeter behind its metal grill you might think there is nothing really special about it. Nothing could be farther from the truth! There is actually a tapered tube behind it which is a direct trickle-down from their top of the line Nautilus speaker. This minimizes back wave distortion from the tweeter, a design technique they developed in the UK using laser analysis. The tweeter driver itself is also what B&W calls a decoupled double dome. It’s basically a very thin aluminum dome that sits on top of a thicker aluminum ring. The benefit of both of these technologies is a high end that is virtually free of any distortion with the ability to play louder before you experience any breakup. At Audio Advice we’ve found a harsh tweeter can quickly lead to listening fatigue, making long term listening less enjoyable. With B&W’s studio history, they know you can not have any listening fatigue at all when it’s your job to listen to music for 8-12 hours straight. Needless to say, the sound of this tweeter is silky smooth and sweet, yet it has a very airy and effortless top end. That combination is very hard to pull off with an off the shelf generic driver, but as we said, this is not a normal tweeter!

The midrange driver, with its yellow, Kevlar design and lack of any apparent surround (the rubber or foam ring around the outside of a midrange) jumps out as something pretty unique. B&W pioneered the use of Kevlar for midrange drivers in their top of the line 800 studio monitor series. The use of Kevlar has since trickled down into their more affordable models like the CM8 S2. The midrange in the CM8 S2 is what B&W calls an FST driver which stands for Fixed Suspension Transducer. This was originally developed for a brand new 800 series that came out a few years ago. B&W did a white paper on all of the tech used in this new 800 series and the lengths they went to on analyzing driver types is just staggering. Through laser analysis, they were able to determine you do not want a super stiff cone material like plastic for a midrange driver. They discovered a flexible, yet light material like woven Kevlar broke up at different frequencies across the surface of the driver, which resulted in less total distortion than a conventional midrange driver. When they introduced this tech in the 800 series, everyone was amazed at the openness of the midrange and how effortless it sounded. With the CM8 S2, this same great-sounding technology is available in a much more affordable speaker.

The dual woofers used in the CM8S2 also have a combination of woven Kevlar and paper that was again the result of extensive laser analysis. We love speakers that use this dual small driver approach for the woofer. You get the surface area of one larger driver with two big benefits. First, this design is super fast and quick. Bass sounds really natural with no overhang. The other benefit is the front of the speaker cabinet is very narrow, which minimizes reflections from the midrange off the front of the cabinet. This type of design typically gives you amazing 3-dimensional imaging which the CM8 S2 certainly is able to portray.

The CM8 S2 is a ported design, which makes it a bit easier to drive. You even get some port plugs that could reduce the bass if your room had some issues of a big bass hump at certain frequencies. The solid connections for speaker wire on the rear will accommodate a single wire or bi-wire connection.

Performance

We connected the CM8 S2’s up to a Cambridge Audio CXA81 with the Cambridge CXN V2 streamer and played some of our Tidal favorites on them. After just a few seconds of listening our fond memories of this speaker came back. This will sound contradictory, but the presentation is liquid, warm, and yet blazing fast which are traits that normally don’t show up all at once in a speaker. You usually get one or the other! They are just super pleasant to listen to and never ever, even on a shrill recording, sound the least bit harsh. Yet the pluck of a guitar or the brush of a cymbal comes across fast and detailed.

We were especially impressed when we played Bob Dylan's 1989 album No Mercy, Man in the Long Black Coat. The bass is very full, yet when the guitar shows up you can hear every pluck coupled with rich harmonics. When Dylan finally comes in singing, you can hear all of the gravel-ness in his voice and pick up on all the subtle emotions that pull you more into the music.

The CM8 S2 is just totally fun to listen to and brought a smile to our face! Another thing that stood out to us as we had other, much larger, tower speakers nearby, is how this slender white version should be able to blend into just about any room. While they may look small though, the soundstage is big from side to side.

Overall Recommendation

The CM8 S2 was a great value when it came out in 2014 and with the price of $1500 a pair we are able to now offer them for, they seem like the deal of the century. Heck, it’s half the price of a pair of the current model! If you have been looking at bookshelf speakers on a stand, you should seriously consider these. They probably have the exact same or even smaller footprint, look extremely elegant in the matte white finish and sound beautiful.

HIGH NOTES UNPACKED

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