Now I’m working from home on a fairly regular basis, I’ve converted a corner of my spare room/kid’s playroom into an office. It’s got a desk, screens and everything. Despite having a Sonos Play:5 in the room, it’s not really suited me for day-to-day music. For some reason I find it too distracting.

Having looked around for a while for a set of “Hi-Fi” desktop speakers for a while, I looked at the old favourite CreativeLabs Gigaworks T40 (relatively cheap, but too large for my needs) to the more exotic and well-regarded Focal XS Book Speakers. I eventually settled on the Bowers and Wilkins (B&W) MM-1 desktop speakers. At £399 this was right at the top of what I wanted to spend for something that might only get intermittent use, but I discovered that some B&W dealers such as Unilet have a limited stock of reconditioned units for £299. After taking delivery via their sister company Home Media in Maidstone, I’ve had nearly a week of playing with them, and thought I’d share my thoughts.

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