thanks for your post ct0517.
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.
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....
@ bombaywallai’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.
They can be if not set up right. This is after all about setup and the sum of all the parts.
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....