Any owners here of Bowers & Wilkins 800 series D4 yet?

Thank you @greginnh , I appreciate you expanding over your initial post. It helps a lot. And you are right about that, speakers are very room and gear dependent.

@thyname this won’t help you but I’ll share it anyway out of interest. I auditioned the 800 D4’s at a dealer a number of months back, with my gear which I took into the shop. I went in expecting I would buy them. I was coming from 803 D2’s at the time (now have 802 D2’s).

I have to say, they sounded absolutely terrible - and I don’t think this was a matter of taste - they were objectively terrible. It was quite a shock and unexpected. Even the dealer agreed things did not sound great. Given that I KNOW these are fantastic speakers the only explanation is that it was a total mismatch for my gear, based around a Gryphon Diablo 300 integrated, Innuos Zenith + PhoenixUSB, and a number of different top tier cables we tried. Other speakers sounded good.

The only theory the salesman had was that the 800 D4’s really needed more powerful monoblocks, despite the fact that the Diablo is a beast.

What did they sound like? TONS of bass. Like, a silly amount of bass. I love bass but this was over the top. And, the mids were so diminished and small sounding it was comically bad.

The 800’s were on its caster wheels which may have been part of the issue.

For the record no one should make any assessments based on my experience, clearly something was wrong with this setup. But not being able to resolve it, there was no way I could proceed with a purchase. Just sharing the experience.

I have an acquaintance who purchased the 802 D4’s and they sound great. Driven by McIntosh so there was that house Mac sound which I’m not a fan of, but the speakers at least sounded nothing like my awful experience with the 800 D4’s!

Correction to my last post - I meant 801 D4 (not 800).