Years ago I owned the original B&W Nautilus 800, the pre diamond tweeter version. Like them in the shop but could never get them to image well. May have been the 9x13x8 room or the c-j tube amps. Eventually replaced them with Wilson Watt-Puppy 7s. Marvelous.
The point of this is a couple of visits recently to my local top line dealer... a Magico shop, and all powerful high prices electronics. Nice speakers but for the $$$, not for me.
Admittedly I'm a Wilson guy, now with the terrific Yvette's.
My local high end guy had just picked up the B&W line to fill in the lower price gap in the shop. He had set up the new 800 D3, so took a listen. No more kevlar mid range...good. But you could hear each driver on each side playing. Tweeter was tweeting, the woofer was woofing, and the mid range was screaming. Terrible.
A couple of weeks later I was back in and there they were again. He asked me to listen again. Just amazing. They needed a few hundred hours to break in and now sounded terrific. Really gave his $100K Magico's a run for the money. We both agreed the B&W's, well run in, were a terrific value. You just never know what your listening town making these comparisons...
