B&W 802D vs Wilson WATT Puppy

Which WP version?

I heard the WP5's quite a bit years ago. What impressed me about them more than anything was the fact that you could be anywhere in the house, and they sounded really good. There was nothing that ever got on my nerves no matter how long I listened.

I only heard the WP7's once. Unfortunately, the demo was a Mel Torme album that was made when stereo first came on the scene. Everything was panned either hard right or hard left, with nothing placed across the middle. I wasn't impressed, but I'm sure that it had nothing to do with the WP7's.

I heard the 803D's, not the 802D's, two weeks ago. It's the first time I've gone beyond "These speakers would be really nice to have" to "I want these speakers!". They are fanatastic! I've heard the 802D's are better, and for $4,000.00 more they'd better be.

If I had the choice and had around $24,000.00 to spend, I'd get the 802D's and use the other $12,000.00 to upgrade something else.

Chuck

I owned a pair of B&W 802 speakers and upgraded to the 800 a year ago at minimal cost. Front-end is Levinson 33H driven directly by 390s CDP and Synergistic Research Cabling (Absolute Reference).

The new D series was released and I decided to upgrade once again. Dealer setup was Levinson gear and Synergistic Research (Designers Ref) cabling. On demo were the 802D speakers that was fully runned-in. The improvement over the 800 was mainly in the tweeter region with tighter bass but not deep enough. The pricing (after trade-in) however was expensive enough for me to consider other makes.

Wilson Audio dealer was kind enough to bring a pair of used Grand Slamm X-1s (series 2) in my home for a few days (the effort to install these was huge). Unfortunately, they were simply too large for my medium-to-large room but what it did well (dynamics, clean harmonics, better resolution) was enough to switch to a high-end speaker. Went back to the B&W 800 and what a disappointment. In comparison, the 800’s sounded ‘constipated’. Due to room size, the option then was to consider the Watt Puppy 7s (which some reviewers consider these to approach the performance of the Grand Slamms). What became very obvious from this exercise was the awful midrange performance of B&W speakers (802, 800 & 802D).

Before making this decision I decided to give the JMLab’s a listen. The dealer had a pair of Alto Utopia Be speakers on demo and once again it was fully runned-in. Setup included a Viola Amp with source components from BAT. To my surprise, these surpassed the performance of both the 802D and 800. The Be tweeters were more than a match to B&W’s Diamond, bass was first class and was able to go lower than the 802D. The large difference comes in the midrange and cross-overs. Here, JMLab is significantly better (more detail, speakers that disappear given the right track, more cleanly defined hormonics, etc.). I purchased and am currently running-in a pair of Nova Utopia Be speakers. In my room, the Nova’s are performing better than the Grand Slamms. They are excelling in all areas and most importantly, I am rediscovering my favourite CDs!

In summary, try to avoid B&W and definitely consider either the Watt Puppy 7 or better yet, JMLab Utopia (Alto or Nova). B&W’s poor midrange performance, its bad cross-over design (high cut-off frequencies and bi-wiring) together with relatively high 2nd and 3rd order harmonic distortion continues to prevent B&W to compete as a high-end speaker.