Bower and Wilkins and its relationship with Classe and Rotel

that’s right - Classe became part of B&W in 2001 while ROTEL became part of B&W back in 1981. Just FYI - ROTEL is a Taiwanese brand. It was founded in Taiwan in 1957 & the founder soon after that moved to Japan.
I’ve not heard B&W + ROTEL but I’ve heard B&W + Classe at the RMAF shows & I can say that the B&W sound horrible with Classe. The sound is etched, screechy, bright, brittle, metallic. 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.
I used to own a B&W pair & drove it with a Symphonic Line power amp & the sonics were pretty good. I also had a friend own a 802N & 802D pair & he also drove it with a Symphonic Line power amp to very good effect. The issue w/ B&W is that if you pair it w/ the wrong sort of amp, the sonics can degrade rapidly.
There is much written about B&W & its sonics - just troll the Audiogon archives & you will find many answers to your question. ;-)

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....

yeah, yeah, yeah!
i've not forgotten the room. I didn't form an opinion after 1 listen at a show, etc, etc....

ct0517 - looked at your system. extensive notes by yourself & others. tried to look for your very formed opinion on the B&W Matrix speakers but there was too much to wade thru. Can you post a link? I'd like to read what your very formed opinion is. Thanks. 

"Oh, I didn’t know BMW made speakers"

funny! my dad said that when I showed him DM604S2 back then (I was driving a BMW also back then so i'm sure he had that auto brand in his mind).... ;-)

@bombaywalla, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. I have owned wide variety of Delta series amps in last 10 years and anyone out there will concur with me that their sound is no where near etched, screechy, bright, brittle or metallic.

Classe amps are one of the most neutral sounding amps and mate quite well with B&W speakers.

Ask the folks at famed Abbey Road studios :-)

it is true that we have very different experiences w/ Classe-B&W. Classe amps from the Dave Reich era (the ones that have DR in their model number) were some of the best & are still prized today. Once Dave Reich left (if I remember correctly he went to Theta Digital?), I believe that Classe amps become quite ho-hum for 2-channel. 
They seem to be going gangbusters for HT tho'....

The good folks at Abbey Road Studios - for monitoring the requirements are quite different vs. home audio. And, for studio monitoring the big B&W speakers makes a lot more sense.  

ct0517,
interesting read re. the B&W BAF.
I read the Ken Rockwell dissertation on the BAF & I believe there’s a typo in Fig 6 - 11 (that seems to be verified as one scrolls lower to the Rohde & Schwarz plots). The freq range (along x-axis) for Fig 6-11 have a "kHz" - i think that’s wrong. The "k" in the "kHz" needs to be removed i.e. the frequency range should be just "Hz". You look at the freq numbers as 50KHz, 100KHz & this is a bass alignment filter - it makes no sense at all. Human beings don’t hear beyond 20KHz + what kind of bass operates in the kilo Hertz range??
Anyway, once you get past this I see the BAF as a subsonic filter (which is also clearly mentioned in the B&W BAF manual) & by providing 6dB peaking in the BAF module B&W is able to extend the bass response of the speaker down to the deep bass region (20-40Hz). Yeah, I can relate to woofers flapping due to TT rumble - I’ve seen that before.
Many Japanese integrated & receiver amps from the 1970s, 1980s also had a subsonic filter switch (like my Yamaha CA-2010) which is a high-pass filter with a -3dB at 15Hz if I remember the contents of its manual correctly.
Yeah, I can see why the B&W Matrix speakers became "efficient" (altho I would not have used that term specifically) by addition of the BAF - the impedance in the deep bass region was increased to 6 Ohms (like the rest of the freq response) meaning that the power amp now can dump current into a large impedance to produce bass thereby taxing it less & like you said opening up the choices of power amps to drive such a large speaker. People who did not use this BAF had to find power amps that were capable of high current into lower impedances implying very expensive & heavier power amps.
The BAF is a gimmick for a speaker whose designer could not design it correctly in the 1st place & had to add a bass extension/alignment filter to fix a flawed initial design.
Ken Rockwell writes that the newer Nautilus speakers do not use this BAF (as it seems to have confused the public since many speakers were bought w/o the BAF + we all have seen several BAFs take a life of their own on eBay when they really have been tied to a particular B&W Matrix speaker model) & have bloated bass. He is very accurate in that statement - I 2nd it from all my listening experiences & my ownership. 

ct0517, 
i was in a bit of a hurry this morning when I posted my comments on the B&W BAF (had to get to the gym for some stress relief! ;-) ). Anyway, a couple of more comments on the B&W BAF

* Ken Rockwell's dissertation says that w/ the B&W BAF the overall response is 6th order (I'm hoping in the bass region because he did not clarify)....

The Bessel alignment also has the advantage that adding a very simple second-order electrical filter (this equalizer) allows one to create a completely different kind of alignment, a sixth-order Butterworth alignment, whose frequency response is also flat, and extends and extra half-octave deeper in the bass.

i looked at the freq plot that B&W Europe sent you & it does not look 6th order by any stretch of the imagination. If it's 6th order then i'm expecting to see a 36dB/octave roll-off in the deep bass region. I don't see such a steep roll-of. Take a look yourself - the roll off is in the 10dB region at best. 
Another observation - there is a dotted line that says "with filter" & a 2nd dotted line that says "without filter". what is the solid line in the bass region that seems to stop around 50Hz? The dotted line "without filter" is not on top of the solid line which i believe is the speaker freq response. How did B&W Europe get that "without filter" dotted line that is completely mismatched to the speaker's frequency response solid line? It's not making any sense to me.....

* Ken Rockwell's dissertation says & you have cut & pasted the same text verbatim on your system page ....

Without this equalizer, the naked B&W Matrix speakers are a vented fourth-order design, specifically in a Bessel alignment. "Fourth-order" is an engineering term that refers to all vented and passive-radiator speakers; sealed boxes are "second order."

this is not a true statement. When I owned a pair of Green Mountain Audio C1.5i floor-stander 3-way speakers the bass box was sealed & was 1st order both electrically & acoustically. There's nothing that says that a sealed box must be 2nd order. You can make it any order you like if the speaker designer knows what he/she is doing.

The B&W BAF is really a very simple concept & elementary filter design - put a 6dB peak at the speaker's bass resonant freq such that the bass driver's droop in freq response is compensated by a boost by the 6dB peak such that the combination's freq response is flat. They chose a 2nd order Bessel - good choice since Bessel filters have maximally flat group delay & you need this to ensure good quality bass, no boomy bass.
  
But the fundamental question still arises - why was a BAF required? The answer to that is - the bass drivers used in the Matrix series speakers were simply not up to the task of reproducing deep bass (20-40Hz). For a speaker manuf that makes all of its own drivers or has them contract manuf by giving the 3rd party tightly controlled driver specs, this is an inherent flaw in the design & the BAF is a band-aid for the speaker. The correct thing to have done back then was to invent a bass driver that was linear into the sub-sonic region so that it natively could reproduce deep bass. Instead B&W used whatever bass driver they had in stock & made users buy the BAF. 
Ken Rockwell's dissertation clearly says that in later years B&W dropped the BAF & the new N, S, D series speakers all have bloated/boomy bass. B&W has still not been able to design the correct bass driver for their speakers!!! wow! what in the world does that say for this manuf??