A question on a B&W high pass filter

Has any of you ever bothered to check why the stock B&W Filter sucks? Guess not or else these comments wouldn't be posted.

Look at the puny power-supplies that barely can do 50-100mA. Open that filter’s hood & take a deep look at the crap parts sitting inside (thanks to a 3rd party assembler that B&W entrusted the job to - so called Manby Electronics & probably at a contracted rate).

In short, the circuit is great but the assembling dudes did a shoddy job, hence it sucks.

After almost a decade, I took that Filter & worked on it. Fully reg PSU with 2.5+ amperes juice using encapsulated transformers in today's age of common SMPS. Heavyduty AWG 16 screened wiring to kick RF goodbye, all internal parts scrapped & substituted using Vishay Bulk-foil resistors that are very, very expensive, again expensive Teflon Multicaps & fully buffered active input stage with output impedance of 10 Ohms!

BTW - I've the Krell filter too. The fully modded B&W filter now walked over D'agostino's Filter like it had it for yesterday's breakfast.

My motivation was spruced up after 2+ decades; having vaguely remembered that I came across an article in 1988 written by a Matrix 801 S2 owner (an EE tech guy) in a magazine 'AUDIO' (that mag is years' history) towards the correct way to use the Filter with the implementation of a top-notch active buffer BUF03AJ/883 MIL spec to lower the impedance.

Tip: Filter MUST be placed either before the audio signal entering your Pre (between analog OUT from source to Pre) OR in the Tape-loop of the Pre (if it has one). Never between Pre & Power.

Now, enjoy your Matrix 800 series! They rock big time.

Why answer an OLD thread?

B'coz a lot of fellas used to read this & RUN on the wrong road.

I found this thread via google when I was researching a question about these filters. I was able to get a B&W 801 high pass filter. This one doesn't have the dip switches to set the filter to a specific 800 series speaker. It is preset for the 801 series B&W speaker only. Would it be bad if I used this filter along with the B&W Matrix 805 bookshelf speakers? I haven't tried it yet and don't want to risk damaging the 805s I have.

Thanks

The short answer is that you probably won't damage your speaker (as long as you don't overpower them), but you also are not going to get much benefit. The filter is preset for the Freq. response of the 801. The variable filter allows you to set the response to the various models (See this link for detailed specs-http://kenrockwell.com/audio/b-w/800-series-bass-alignment-filter.htm). If anything , it might muddy the sound of the speakers. A third party manufactured these devices, and the parts are kinda crappy. If you really want to use the filter, I'd suggest selling this one and keep looking for the variable version with the DIP switches. Good Luck!