Bowers & Wilkins706 S2 Satin White (Pair)

Great high end, they sound very crisp. Broke in nicely after a few days.

These speakers are the real McCoy, I replaced svs ultra bookshelves with these B&W's for $999.00 which is what I paid for the svs speakers about a year and a half ago and they were worth it. But these B&W's are so much better and for the same money this is an unbelievable value. I haven't even broke them in yet and they sound so so good. I was worried when I first ordered them that I was making a lateral replacement but these B&W's are a couple of levels better than the svs's. Just buy these and you won't be sorry.

I extensively A/B tested these for use a nearfield desktop setup against the lauded KEF LS50 Metas. Setup is as follows:Schiit Vidar 2Schiit Jotunheim with multibit DACApple Lossless / HBR (https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/speaker-testing-the-master/pl.u-AejGHYWRZA)The KEF are a fun speaker. They have a great punch in the mids. The imaging is awesome. The design is really striking.However, after a great deal of going back and forth, I ended up choosing the B&W. They have the sparkle. The detail is greater. They have that quality where you look over and say to yourself, "I've never heard the guitarist's fingers running down the neck of the guitar before!"They are also more forgiving speakers, that don't require every track to be perfect. A good example here is I could play Spotify playlists all day long and they sounded great. With the KEF, they were a more picky speaker (without EQ intervention).Lastly, they produce a larger sound at near field, that sound is much more delicate and more transparent. You can see through the B&W, where as the KEF were far more dense.That all being said, if I were not side-by-siding these, I would have easily kept the KEF, they were a wonderful speaker.But... and here's the big one... The tweeter has failed 2 weeks in. I was on a zoom call (yep, they get used for that too) and I heard a very strange and awful vibration at a certain frequency. I thought it may just be poor zoom audio, but sure enough, the next day I played a track from a new single/ep called Montorose Tape by Michael Nau, and I stopped in my tracks. I flipped the left channel speaker to the right channel to make sure I wasn't going crazy, and it was very much that tweeter with the issue. I called B&W and they told me to drive them to a local repair place... yeah, no thanks for 2 week old speakers. I'll be exchanging on Amazon.So. Where are we now?I think I'll exchange them, since they are a great pair of speakers, but I'll be auditioning the KEF R3's in between shipments. My confidence has been shaken a little in these China-produced Bowers units. But I have to believe this was a fluke.