Bowers and Wilkerson B&W 802 D3: an impolite Brit?

Sunnyjim, you tell it like it is !
A 1300$ of Rega RS-3 sounds better.

Overall, I hope these responses will help out our comrade, Tom. If learning to fly a jet plane was compared to learning the steps to audio nirvana, many of us would have crashed and burned long ago.

Unfortunately, no matter how many audio primers and product reviews there are, there are as many if not more obstacles to overcome to finding the sound quality you enjoy and more importantly, find just right.

Tompoodie, to respond directly to your criticism of the 803 D3, after spending another few hours with them. I would wonder if they were not set up well or were too close to the walls. My experience with them listening to a few recordings with excellent acoustic segments (Nora Jones first album, Grateful Dead reckoning, Allman Brothers Eat a Peach Album) is that they were exceedingly realistic. They sound like what a guitar sounds like when I'm in the room playing with other musicians, to the point where the positioning of fingers on the neck corresponded with placement in the soundstage. It doesn't get any better than that in my experience. The last speaker I had that was close to that level of realism was the Revel Salon2. My current setup unfortunately is not on par with the Salon2 or the 803 D3.

To be honest, they are exceedingly difficult to set up. They are not very forgiving at all from my experience today. I am going back again tomorrow to try to fine tune the positioning some more. I may purchase them if I can get rid of a slight boominess in some of the lower voice frequencies. Instruments were insanely lifelike, as well as the human voice in most keys, except where there was some boominess in lower keys. Attack, decay, and separation of instruments was all spot on. The soundstage was large and impressive. I found the experience of listening to the music was engaging and immersive. Several tracks that I love were so life like that it gave me the chills. It reminds me that it's extremely important for people to know how to set up speakers in a room themselves on the fly, or to at least be able to realize when a setup is suboptimal.

I'm back with my regular speakers right now and the 803 D3 experience is leaving my regular system sounding quite unidimensional in comparison. The attack and decay are not as precise and the separation between instruments and notes is not as coherent. :/

Right now the only criticism I can aim at them is a slight sibilance in the higher ranges of the human voice along with the boominess in certain low frequencies of the human voice. Tomorrow I hope to see if the sibilance can be eliminated with less toe-in, while also trying to decrease the lower voice frequency boominess by moving further off one of the walls. Hopefully this is possible without the center of the soundstage becoming too diffuse...

In any case, it's still worlds better than my current setup.

"Tomorrow I hope to see if the sibilance can be eliminated with less toe-in, while also trying to decrease the lower voice frequency boominess by moving further off one of the walls."

Its not likely that toe in will get rid of sibilance. That's an equipment matching issue.