B&W, Aerial 7B -- my impressions, something off?

Hi folks

I have recently started to look at speakers to replace my Thiel 1.2s. The present system consists of
CAL Icon Mk II (no power boss) ->
Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 ->
Classe fifteen ->
Thiel 1.2s.

Everything else is fine, but despite my trying, the system is still on the bright side. It sounds fairly smooth otherwise, but the upper frequencies seem to be tilted up. I would prefer a mellower setup. Given that, I have recently listened to a couple of speakers:

(i) B&W Nautilus 804: Driven by all Krell gear, they sounded much smoother than my system. They did not give up on the high frequencies at all -- those were still there; however, the overall balance was much more to my liking. The only downside -- sweet spot was very small, with small movements of the head changing image positions dramatically.

(ii) Aerial Acoustics 7B: The setup was Pioneer Elite CD -> Levinson pre-amp -> Pass Labs amp -> Aerial. The system sounded harsh! Everything that I threw at it sounded lean. It was not as if the bass frequencies were not there. For example, even on the cut "So what" (Kind of Blue -- special gold edition), the bass was there with the prominent role it plays in the cut, but whenever the horns came in, I felt like running out of the room. My present system sounds much better. Everything else was there, though. Imaging was fantastic and very stable. The moment I switched to the B&W 802s on the same system, though, the system sounded much better balanced (and in comparison, positively sweet). The imaging problem remained, though.

So, what gives? Are these impressions generally spot on, or was there something in either of these set-ups that undermined the speakers' strengths.

Any feedback will be very helpful.

Thanks,

--amit
(Amit Mathur)