Bowers and Wilkins has announced two new Mini Theatre (MT-series) home cinema systems.
Replacing the long-running and highly successful MT-25 and MT-30 packages, the new MT-50(below) and MT-60D cost £1094 and £1945 respectively.
Both feature significant revisions aimed at improving both the sound quality of the individual speakers in each system, and their cohesiveness as complete packages.
As before, the two new Bowers and Wilkins systems share the same design of satellite speaker. Called (like the outgoing design) the M-1, the new speaker is no larger than its forebear, standing just 25cm high atop it its plinth-type stand, but it’s been substantially reworked to deliver a more full-range sound.
The M-1’s new drive units are in-house designs, with a tweeter very similar in quality and tonality to that employed in B&W’s CM series, plus an all-new longer-throw mid/bass driver.
This employs a four-layer coil for superior efficiency, a simplified crossover and a new, much longer port, and the result, claims Bowers and Wilkins, is frequency response down to around 55Hz, rather than the 90Hz limit of the older speaker.
Complementing the new M-1s is the new PV1D, the replacement for the near-legendary PV1 active subwoofer, a design that dates back to 2004.
A twin-driver design like its forebear, the PV1D adopts DSP (Digital Signal Processing) to optimise its performance (hence the ‘D’ in its model name).
Accessible via an OLED display plus a touchbutton interface mounted on the central band of its enclosure, the DSP both optimises the PV1D’s overall performance and allows for a degree of user-adjustable equalisation to suit different applications.
For example, should you want to use the PV1D in a 2.1 configuration, it provides preselected EQ modes to help integrate it with any one of six different types of B&W speaker.
The PV1D’s drive units (2 x 20cm) and amplification (400w) have been tweaked too, and the result, says the company, is a subwoofer with all the speed and agility of its predecessor plus considerable additional bass extension.
The PV1D forms the subwoofer element of the premium MT-60D package (above), and is available separately at £1200. Meanwhile, the cheaper MT-50 package continues with the compact ASW608 subwoofer, as used in the older MT-25 package.
Both MT-50 and MT-60D are available in March in either matt white or matt black finishes, and you can read our First Test of the MT-60D in our April issue, on sale 8th March.
