MISSION 700
It happened in the car industry a while back with the Mini, Beetle and Fiat 500 – and now it’s happening to the audio business. Especially where loudspeakers are concerned, companies are looking to their heritage when developing new products – and they seem to be going down a storm with customers. And of course, it doesn’t do any harm if you have a heritage as considerable as that of Mission.
These 700 standmounters represent the second time Mission has delved into its own past to produce a new speaker – and, just as with the 770 from earlier this year, this is nostalgia brought right up to date. Everything everyone always loved about the way the original 700 speaker looked – the main driver sitting above the offset tweeter, the gaping bass reflex port, the bright white front baffle and the rotten company logo – is present and correct on the new version.
But this is no sentimental journey: the soft-dome tweeter and mineral-loaded polypropylene mid/bass driver are state-of-the-art designs. The result is a loudspeaker that has all the merit of the 1980 original (which is down, in large part, to the hefty dimensions of the cabinet itself) but with the benefits of 21st-century engineering.
So the sound of the
Mission 700 is appropriately big, with real low-frequency authority and agility. There’s plenty of across-the-board detail retrieved, and that oversized tweeter combines refinement with genuine bite. Dynamic headroom is considerable – when the going gets rowdy you’ll know all about it. The open nature of the soundstage means you get real clarity, and while there’s plenty of aggression these units are capable of deft subtlety too.
Ultimately you’re not short of choice when it comes to loudspeakers at this sort of money – and let’s face it, ‘retro’ may not be an entirely positive word if you’re a future-loving Stuff reader.
But once you hear the Mission 700s in action, the fact that they’re designed to look like a throwback ceases to be their main selling point.
Key specs
● 1in tweeter, 6.5in mid/bass driver, bass reflex port
● 510x270x260mm,
6.5kg each