Things We Love: Bowers & Wilkins 603 Speakers

Founded in the seaside town of Worthing, West Sussex, England, in 1966 by John Bowers, Bowers & Wilkins is a brand world-renowned for more than five decades of innovative speaker design. The company became a household name with audiophiles thanks to innovations such as its patented tweeter-on-top design, which removed the tweeter from the speaker cabinet and placed it atop the cabinet, resulting in clearer high audio frequencies, with minimal distortion and resonance from the speaker cabinets. Other noteworthy innovations include Bowers & Wilkins’s highly recognizable yellow Kevlar midrange drivers with Fixed Suspension Transducer (FST) technology that was designed for rigidity and minimal distortion, and diamond dome tweeters for improved high-frequency detail and clarity.

Trickle-Down Technology

In 2015, Bowers & Wilkins retired the yellow Kevlar midrange drivers from its top models, replacing them with the new proprietary Continuum cone midrange drivers. Like the yellow Kevlar, the Continuum midrange has a distinct silver color. The Continuum cone is a coated woven material developed in-house by Bowers & Wilkins engineers. Initially designed for the manufacturer’s flagship models, the Continuum cone material trickled down to more affordable ranges in the Bowers & Wilkins speaker lineup, with the latest being its 600 Series speakers.
Sitting atop the range of the 600 Series is the 603 floorstanding speakers. The 603 is a 3-way speaker that features two paper bass drivers, one midrange driver, and a decoupled double-dome aluminum tweeter. The midrange driver is a Continuum cone coupled with FST technology to deliver clarity with voices and instruments. Dual 6.5" paper bass drivers ensure the delivery of low frequencies. Lastly, the decoupled double-dome aluminum tweeter delivers break-up effects of high frequencies up to 38 kHz. In layman terms, the tweeter delivers clear high-frequency sounds, while filtering out distortion and break-up performance inherent in sound reproduction as frequencies go up.