Bowers and Wilkins DM12's

[Pulse Studio]

Here is something a little different if a bit dated and one I have never seen here before so I would like some of those members that may remember them with either good or bad experiences to offer their opinions please.

I have a pair of these lovely engineered and finished speakers, the veneer on these is to die for, a beautiful deep grain Walnut, the bass unit is a Polymer 6" B&W design as too is the soft dome tweeter I believe, I picked them up many years ago from a car boot for £15 as one of the tweeters had blown OC, I managed to get a couple of replacement diaphrams from B&W and the refit was simplicity in itself.

I have listened to them on my systems but keep arriving back to the same conclusions, they are warm and with a definate mid suck out, does anyone else remember these old not so classics, and if so what are your views, can they be made to sound a little more lively with some mid range prescence ?? and why is the bass unit mounted using 4 rubber isolation cup washers, anyone ??

Paul

 

[Pulse Studio]

So no one has heard of these old not so classics !! or are they really that bad that no one wants to comment ??
This is what they look like:

http://s202.photobucket.com/albums/aa59/pulsestudio/?albumview=grid&fullsize=Picture012.jpg

just look at that veneer grain, is that a Flame or Burr Walnut finish, whatever it is superb and they can be had for little money these days.

Paul

 

[andrew tooley]

the rubber gromits are to de couple energy from the bass unit at certain fr equencys from the enclosure.it tends to make things sound a bit restrained try them with these taken out it should tighten the low end a bit and push lower mid a bit more forward (from memory!)

 

[Pulse Studio]

Cheers Andrew, I will certainly try your recommendation to remove the rubber cup washers, never seen anything like them before, the LF is actually quite tight and well controlled being an IB design, and the extension is very good for the cabinet size. Many years ago I pulled out the x-over, a very simple 2nd order design from memory which uses electrolytics ( nasty ) and has the overload protection circuit tagged in there ( now disabled ), I decided to remove the complete x-over and replaced it with.................and please don't laugh .............a Lentek S4 2 way 4th order x-over, I don't know why as the drivers are nothing alike, the Lentek's used Audax units and an 8" LF driver at that, but the sound that imparted from the DM12's was quite stunning, if maybe it was incorrect on paper, they seemed to come alive with a really neutral mid band and less warm and more dynamic overall character, I changed them back to the standard B&W x-overs a couple of months later, don't know why really !! I still have the S4 x-overs so maybe in anthor senior moment of madness I may try them again, just for the hell of it, you never know do you, and now I also have access to a quality speaker frequency response and impulse response test set-up so I can make some frequency plots of them with the S4 x-overs in place, I have already made plots of the standard DM12's, so a comparison will be easliy achieved.

 

[andrew tooley]

a few loudspeakers from that era used rubber gromits on the bass or mid units various kef models ,rogers ls2 and ls4 i think seems such a long time ago......