Wow. I'm just finding this thread now. Is there any chance I could get some of that wonderful w90 tone you are describing with the w60's? I'm looking for speakers now.That's about as big as I can fit the small room that I'll be using. Seems like the smallest "big" speaker around. I just posted a thread in the speaker forum yesterday concerning the w60's. If I had known there was a Wharfedale thread going here I'd have posted here.
Hard to say. The W90 is on a different level, dynamically-speaking, and it dips a lot lower and slams a lot harder than the W60's. They both have the same kind of rich, lush, open-sounding British voicing when you hit them with tubes, but the W60's have more of that lush, bloomy character and are noticeably-more-indicative of the classic BRITISH-marketed Wharfedale models of the 1950's, much more so than the W90's, which have a noticeably-more-American bass response. Remember, the W60 was the first of BIC-Wharfedale's 'bass-loving-American-friendly' W*0 models which were designed specifically to compete with AR's east coast offerings of the early '60's, as well as other east coast brands of the 1960's, including KLH.
But that bigger, tighter, more-focused and dynamic bass response is surely also a result of the W90's much-more-ambitious, TOTL design. It's more than twice the speaker the W60 is, thanks to it's better tweeters, isolated/subdivided dual woofer section, and mirror-imaged dual 3-way, six-driver design. It has much better extension, dynamics, and transient response. The W60 can only do so much with two drivers.
The W60 is a great speaker though. I believe Leopold Stokowski had a pair in his home system. Excellent for old jazz and blues stuff, and I think it's perfect for Beatles, Doors, Hendrix, '60's and early '70' Stones and Zeppelin, etc. (especially on vinyl) not to mention late '60's blues-rock and psychedelic-rock as well as early rock & roll, rockabilly, and country from the '50's and '60's.
The W60 is certainly the more-old-school of the two, but I may have been a little hasty saying it was like a smaller version of that sound, because the two models do have their differences. Think of it as maybe a Jaguar XJ6 compared to the 12-cylinder, TOTL Jaguar XJS. That's one way to describe the W60 and W90. But one important thing that separates the two is the W90's ability to serve up the kind of 'big speaker' bass response, control, and imaging that can only come from multiple woofers/mids/tweeters.
Bigger... Better... More.