Speaker upgrade choices B&W 685 or similar for small man cave ?

Have to say I adore my B&W 601 S3 — the previous version to the 685s?

So easy to place with the front facing bass port.

Quick update.

The B&W FS700 stands I found on ebay at the weekend arrived today They are in perfect condition with no marks/scratches/dents or cross-threaded fasteners/missing spikes and for £125 the price was a lot more palettable than the £250 they seem to go for new in the shops.  They had been used as demo stands in a Hifi shop somewhere in Edinburgh so no real use or abuse.

Coming from the Atacama Nexus stands the build quality on the B&W stands is greatly improved - everything is precision machined and the cast bases are extremely heavy.  With the speakers sat on top they are significantly more study than the Nexus they replace.  I think they are a bit more pleasing on the eye than the industrial looking black of the old ones too.  The same shop on ebay had a black pair of demo FS700 go at the same time for £170 - I'm glad I got the silver/grey ones now.

Do they sound any better ? well - thats debatable really - I have fresh speakers that haven't had a workout yet (or should that be my ears/head haven't gotten used to them yet) so its like starting again and hard to draw any true comparison.  If I get some time tomorrow I'll pull the tops off and add some ballast so they match the setup of the old Nexus stands.

I'll give them a week and let you know what I think.

The captcha on these forums is sooooo last decade.

Well,

one week on I have to say the FS700 stands work really well.  To begin with the stand sounded quite buzzy (if you flicked them with your finger you'd get a hollow 'ting' from them) but this has now been resolved by filling them to within 18cm of the top with Kiln sand.  The stands now give off a nice mutted thud when you flick them.   The bases are so steady on them and now with the added weight of the sand the low end frequencies of the speaker are really nice.

Only downside this week is my Cambridge Audio 640C cd transport started being awkward and giving me the 'no disc' message all the time.  Fortunately I just pulled the Digital Coax from the back and plugged it into my Cambridge 540D dvd player.  Given the DAC is now responsible for sound that gets sent to the amp it hasn't made any noticable difference to sound quality - only set back is the DVD player takes longer to do its initial scan of disks.

After some research it seems the thing thats likely to be the cause of the problem is when the laser pickup starts to fail - the motor is working fine as it spins the disc without issue - then stops again as it fails to locate the start of the disk.  I did get it working again by re-seating some of the ribbon leads but it soon failed again.   I've managed to get a brand new Sony laser pickup for £5.95 - this is the exact model (KSS-213C) that I believe Cambridge use in the 540/640c - I'll install it tonight which should hopefully get everything working again.

fingers crossed.

Brilliant!

£5.95 plus 15mins with the top off and a screw driver has it all working again.

Sorry Hi-Fi industry - you won't be getting £600 off me in the near future for a new CD transport.