Bowers & Wilkins CM8 S2 Tower Speaker Review: https://audioadvice.io/35rhICo | Chat with us online: https://www.audioadvice.com/ | Call for sales and support: 888.899.8776 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. 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. 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. At Audio Advice, we love bringing home technology to life and we have been doing so for over 40 years. We were named Best Specialty A/V Retailer in the United States by TWICE Magazine and have won the Bravo award from Metro magazine for “Best Place to Buy a Home Media System” each year since its creation. Read more product reviews on our website: http://bit.ly/2Wqqs8l Follow us on Instagram: http://bit.ly/2PVgQyG Raleigh, North Carolina Location: http://bit.ly/2lTSlrI Charlotte, North Carolina Location: http://bit.ly/2HZqm2i