Bowers and Wilkerson B&W 802 D3: an impolite Brit?

I listened to the 803 D3 earlier today. The sound quality was incredible. The room setup was a bit small, and whoever set them up put them close to the wall, which caused the mid-range (voices especially) to sound muffled and raspy, and caused the bass to be boomy. I quickly used the WASP setup method and found a much better placement. I'm sure with more time and tweaking I could have fine tuned them more, but oh well, the Best Buy employee was giving me an odd look already.

Once set up decently they sounded spectacular to me. The high frequency was incredible. The sounds of symbols and high hats were realistic. Their decay sounded authentic to me as a musician. What impressed me the most was that the notes across all ranges had a correct sound to their decay. Musicians used to playing instruments through crappy speakers, and who don't play acoustically, may not notice it, but the decay on instruments were as close to the real thing as I have ever heard without it being an acoustic instrument in the room with me. The room was not conducive to a large soundstage like I would have available in my apartment. I plan on going back and playing with the toe-in, as they were set up pointed directly at the listening position in Best Buy. I'm excited to bring some of my own CDs and experiment with the setup a bit to see how wide a soundstage these speakers can thrown without losing coherence in between the speakers.

BTW, I actually had a bottle of milk with me and it did not spoil.... LOL...

BTW, I would love to find a pair of these on sale or discounted once they've been out for a bit. I'm a ready buyer when they come along at the right price...

Tompoodie, to respond directly to your criticism of the 803 D3, after spending another few hours with them. I would wonder if they were not set up well or were too close to the walls. My experience with them listening to a few recordings with excellent acoustic segments (Nora Jones first album, Grateful Dead reckoning, Allman Brothers Eat a Peach Album) is that they were exceedingly realistic. They sound like what a guitar sounds like when I'm in the room playing with other musicians, to the point where the positioning of fingers on the neck corresponded with placement in the soundstage. It doesn't get any better than that in my experience. The last speaker I had that was close to that level of realism was the Revel Salon2. My current setup unfortunately is not on par with the Salon2 or the 803 D3.

To be honest, they are exceedingly difficult to set up. They are not very forgiving at all from my experience today. I am going back again tomorrow to try to fine tune the positioning some more. I may purchase them if I can get rid of a slight boominess in some of the lower voice frequencies. Instruments were insanely lifelike, as well as the human voice in most keys, except where there was some boominess in lower keys. Attack, decay, and separation of instruments was all spot on. The soundstage was large and impressive. I found the experience of listening to the music was engaging and immersive. Several tracks that I love were so life like that it gave me the chills. It reminds me that it's extremely important for people to know how to set up speakers in a room themselves on the fly, or to at least be able to realize when a setup is suboptimal.

I'm back with my regular speakers right now and the 803 D3 experience is leaving my regular system sounding quite unidimensional in comparison. The attack and decay are not as precise and the separation between instruments and notes is not as coherent. :/

Right now the only criticism I can aim at them is a slight sibilance in the higher ranges of the human voice along with the boominess in certain low frequencies of the human voice. Tomorrow I hope to see if the sibilance can be eliminated with less toe-in, while also trying to decrease the lower voice frequency boominess by moving further off one of the walls. Hopefully this is possible without the center of the soundstage becoming too diffuse...

In any case, it's still worlds better than my current setup.

"Jkalman, the sibilance is a phase distortion issue & it won't go away with toe-in (like Zd542 wrote). I bet that whatever you try you will not be able to get rid of it. It's inherent in the speaker design & the 4th order x-over. The boomy bass is due to the poor port design. B&W cannot get this right & didn't get it right even in my DM604S2 nor in my friend's 803D. Port design is hard to start with - you have to start & stop a slug of air at a moment's notice given the fact that the bass from the port is 180 degrees out-of-phase with the bass cone driver. If you don't design this correctly, you get bass overhang or what you call boomy bass - the previous bass notes hung around too long & interfere with the next bass notes (from the next bit of music) & smear it.
Play some tracks from Diana Krall's Love Scenes - sibilance city if you will. Let us know at point in time you walked out of the room!"

Hello Bombaywalla,

My understanding is that they don't use a 4th order crossover in the 803 D3s (and haven't in their high end diamond speakers for some time). They use a first order crossover.

In any case, playing around with the room placement and toe-in some more eliminated the issues I was having with the sound. I never said there was problems in the bass frequencies. It was a bit of booming in the mid-range, mostly in the lower register of voices, which don't come close to the bass ranges. The excessive sibilance was from having the tweeters pointed in too much. Sibilance is natural in the human voice, especially in the female voice. Finding the point at which it sounds natural is the goal, not eliminating it completely.

Actually, acoustically speaking, the smearing of notes will happen more because you haver the speaker to close to a wall than anything else. When there is not enough time delay between the direct sound from the speakers and the sound from the first point reflections, then the sounds become smeared, otherwise it becomes ambience. Though, too much ambience can color the sound with the character of the room, and that isn't good either (thus, the need to properly treat first reflection points). The port on the back shouldn't be an issue unless you are already making the mistake of bad speaker placement.

The other issue is placing the speaker too far into the room, at which point locality of sound becomes too diffuse. That is problematic as well.

BTW, I bought them, and it looks like I will be the first person in the USA, or possibly the world to own a pair of the 803 D3s! :D