Bower and Wilkins and its relationship with Classe and Rotel

Bombaywalla
B&W is a very hard speaker to like to begin with & pairing it with a Classe amp was a bad idea in my opinion.

@ bombaywalla

They can be if not set up right. This is after all about setup and the sum of all the parts. Unfortunately the forums never seem to discuss the basics of how a certain brand of speaker is designed, and room interactions. For example some do not realize that B&W 800 series speakers are voiced in an anechoic chamber.

Click here

http://blog.bowers-wilkins.com/sound-lab/tools-of-the-trade-the-anechoic-chamber/

and their drivers are voiced to be aligned (come into focus together) after a specific distance.

For example again;

The 802d series speakers (very popular in homes and recording studios), you need to be sitting at least 9 feet 10 inches away for their drivers to be aligned. (coherent)

Bombaywalla your AudioGon moniker shows the maxwell tape guy listening to speakers a few feet away. This is not possible with B&W 800 series. :^) Well that’s not right. You can do it. But it is not what these speakers were designed for. So you can make something work, or you can make something work well.

How many dealers tell customers this ^^^ information. or are they even aware of it, as it is not clear in the owners manual. 

@ OP macandtosh

+1 to what DS said about different brand amplifiers.

thanks for your post ct0517.

@ bombaywalla

They can be if not set up right. This is after all about setup and the sum of all the parts.

i’m afraid that I don’t fully agree. if a piece of audio gear is correctly designed it’s sensitivity to the other components is much reduced to the point where that particular piece of audio gear sounds good in virtually every setup. No doubt, it sounds better & better as the quality of accompanying audio gear improves.
Both my setup & my friends was good/correct - my listening position is 3m & my friend’s was more. I did not measure but it looked like his chair was further back than mine.

How many dealers tell customers this ^^^ information. or are they even aware of it ?

true! I did a lot of reading, talking to industry manuf, visits to friends’ homes & of course a lot of positioning of the speaker & my chair in my room. At that time my friend used to own a TacT preamp unit & I had him measure my room so that I could treat it accordingly.

Bombaywalla your AudioGon moniker shows the maxwell tape guy listening to speakers a few feet away. This is not possible with B&W 800 series. :^)

nice one!! :-) LOL! you were not supposed to catch that (rookie) mistake, ct0517!! ;-)

The B&W speakers I had were inherently flawed by design. I wrote a lot about this on AudioAsylum back in the day. There was another B&W owner in New Zealand at that time who owned a B&W 801 (if my memory serves me correctly) who also discovered the same flaw as I did) & we exchanged quite a few posts on several related threads. You can troll the Speaker Asylum - the threads are still there the last time I checked.

 I had a much more favorable view of the older B&W Matrix speakers that I listened to in the mid-1990s. I liked that sound much more - it had some soul to it. I also believe that those Matrix series speakers were designed when John Bowers himself was still alive & perhaps the last rev of speaker before his passing.
I’ve heard them recently & always make it a point to hear them at shows (just because that’s the only place i can hear them; they’ll never be entering my house again! ;-) ) or a friend’s place, etc. The sonics I hear tells me that nothing has changed in their speaker design & I hear the same flaws I did back then.That’s OK with me - just because I don’t care for this brand doesn’t mean they are going to change OR that others will not like them. I just move along & find something else - that’s just the way it is in audio. There's enough derogatory material on this brand to fill a tome & that tells me that I'm not off-base in my comments. If you like them - great! I'm happy for you. Buy them & enjoy your music thru them....

........oh boy here we go again!  Another love/hate B&W thread.....

I've heard them sound quite good and at other times, they left me scratching my head.  I had B&W 805s with an Arcam integrated and Nina Simone was in the living room with me singing.  I'm no huge fan, but why are they always being trashed?  Yes, I'll take Thiel, Proac or Vandersteen any day for my listening preferences, but when I think of classical or big scale orchestral, I think of B&W.  Obviously, YMMV......

1+ douglas_schroeder

All high end components, speakers, cables requires careful pairing and fine tuning. That's how you achieve best possible 'synergy' between components. 

I achieved much better results by pairing my 800D2 with Modwright SS amps and tube preamp over all Classe processor / amp components. By no means Classe sounded bad with 800D2's but it didn't sound as magical as Mod's tube and SS combo.  

The demos at audio shows are hit or miss in a 20x20 room. I wouldn't bash any well regarded brand based on just one listening session :-)