Close your eyes and picture a chair. This image in your mind is the ideal of a chair, of how a chair should look. The Platonic conception of a chair. That chair may not exist in the real world, but it’s what you think a chair should look like.
In my mind, I have a Platonic conception of a B&W (the company that’s now known as Bowers & Wilkins) 801 speaker. It’s square, for the most part, with a robot-head module that houses the separate midrange and tweeter. This description matches the first iteration of a speaker that’s still in production today, which appeared at the tail end of the 1970s. That was when I first encountered the 801, and it made quite the impression on me, as it did on the rest of the world. My mental image of this speaker is so clear, so defined in my mind’s eye, that it could easily work as a placeholder for my Platonic conception of The Stereo Speaker.
It’s an important speaker, up there with the Linn LP12 turntable and Krell KSA-50 amplifier on the small list of landmark stereo components that changed the direction of audio.
The 801 has been in constant production since 1979, evolving through numerous iterations, but always retaining the separate midrange and tweeter module above a bass cabinet. Of note was the 801 Matrix back in 1987, with its almost-overbuilt cabinet. There the company engaged a focus on cabinet rigidity that was far ahead of its time, and still exists today.
In 1998, the 801 began its evolution toward its current organic shape, courtesy of stylistic trickle-down from the curves-everywhere 800 Nautilus. The tweeter gained its tapered tube during this period (a technology developed by Laurence Dickie while he was with B&W).
The next stage in the evolution of the 801 came in 2005, with the advent of the diamond tweeter—more about this drive unit later. Over the next decade, the 801 went from series D1—the first with the diamond tweeter—to D3, culminating in the D4, the current iteration of an iconic speaker first introduced 45 years ago.
Would you find it odd if I told you I had never heard a modern Bowers & Wilkins speaker in my room? I’d seen this British brand’s speakers at shows, heard them in friends’ houses, and been aware of them for years, but for some reason, I’d never ended up with one of their products in my system.
Then came my chance to rectify this oversight. Within days of receiving the offer to review a pair of Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 Signature speakers, two large, heavy boxes arrived at my house. The $55,000-per-pair (all prices in USD) 801 D4 Signature is the top production model made by Bowers & Wilkins. Nothing like jumping in with both feet, right?
The luxury
Let’s get to it. You can read about how these chunky fellas fit into my room and see some setup photos in my November editorial. The 801 Signatures are large, dense, heavy speakers. At 222 pounds apiece, they’re a handful. There are several reasons why these speakers, which are only 48″ tall, weigh so much. First, while the main cabinet’s internal braces are nowhere near as intricate as the labyrinth that was the original 801 Matrix, the D4 Signature is still hella braced. There are all kinds of horizontal and vertical braces within the main cabinet; some are metal, while others are thick plywood. The main enclosure is formed from many layers of birch ply, heated, bent, and glued. The sides join a cast-aluminum spine, which in turn is affixed to a cast-aluminum top plate and bottom plate. That long vertical slice of aluminum is a great heatsink, and as such, it’s the ideal location for the crossover. The lower section’s front baffle is also aluminum but is not attached to the top or bottom plate. The teardrop midrange enclosure is also aluminum, as is the tweeter tube—more weight there. That midrange module is decoupled from the woofer cabinet, and you can feel some give when you move it around.
Such significant mass, combined with the organic shapes of the three enclosures, results in a stiff, non-resonant cabinet. I played these speakers louder than any I’ve yet had in my room, and with my hand on each part of the enclosure I felt no vibration.
The two drive units in the bass cabinets are each 10″ in diameter. They’re stout drivers, ported out the bottom of the enclosure. Bowers & Wilkins claims that the -3dB point for these guys is 15Hz. Up top, the 6″ midrange driver’s surround is smoothly integrated into the cabinet, which no doubt helps with a smooth off-axis response.
I was fascinated by the 801 Signature’s tweeter. Its diaphragm is made from diamond. This raises an important distinction. It’s not a “diamond-coated” tweeter (read: a metal dome that’s deposited with a carbon vapor). No, this is a true diamond dome that’s manufactured by coating a mold with industrial diamond. The mold is then dissolved, leaving only a single disc of actual, honest-to-God diamond.
The 801 Signatures that I received sported the Midnight Blue Metallic finish. This is a dark royal blue that’s finished to an extremely high standard. The multiple coats of lacquer are machine-polished using a computerized multi-axis machine, a process that I was unaware existed. The top of the bass cabinet, the collar that encircles the midrange module, is finished in leather from Connolly, the company that supplies the upholstery for Ferrari and Aston Martin.
Bowers & Wilkins also offers the 801 in a non-Signature version for $42,000. The extra $13,000 for the Signature buys a number of upgrades. First off, the Midnight Blue Metallic and the crazy California Burl Gloss finishes are only available on the Signature model. Internally, the crossover is upgraded on the Signature, as is the bracing on the main enclosure. Both the top plate and the base plinth of the main enclosure are upgraded. The woofers also receive some love, with upgraded motor systems. The flared port is made from aluminum, which decreases resonances, instead of plastic.
From a visual standpoint, this is not a speaker for the meek. The 801 Signatures are unavoidably dramatic. These two Erté sculptures at the front of my room, liveried in their deep blue lacquer and flawless black leather, just enchanted me. The chrome rings around the woofers and the midrange add a bright focal point that draws the eye, highlighting the depth of the cabinet’s finish.
It’s a large, prominent piece of artwork that seems to appeal to most people, but those who don’t like the 801 Signature’s appearance really don’t like it. But I just loved these things. I loved how they look, their dramatic The Fifth Element diva appearance, and how they sound.
Oh man, did I love how they sound.
For context, in this review I ran the 801 Signatures from the Hegel Music Systems H30A amplifier by way of a pair of Crystal Cable Art Series Monet cables. Each speaker rolls out of its shipping carton on casters that are mounted underneath the plinth, and this is a huge help in installation and setup. Once the speakers are in place, you install the spikes from the top of the plinth and essentially jack up the speakers so that the casters come off the ground. I didn’t fuss much with the positioning—my first try sounded fantastic, and I pretty much left them in their original position. This combination of positioning and gear sounded so spectacular that at no point in the review period was I willing to change anything.
So this is what all the fuss is about
“Write about them now, while you’re excited,” said Doug Schneider, the boss-man publisher of SoundStage!
“Well yeah,” I responded. “That’s the plan.”
Of course it was, but as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The sound of the 801s, their sheer presence, both audible and visual, was a logical smack in the chops. I honestly found myself speechless from the first few notes these speakers played. There would be no writing for the first while, not after I had just taken one right in the face.
It took about two weeks for me to settle in and dissect why the 801s affected me so. First off, there’s an effortless, dynamic snap that these speakers exude from the midrange right up through the lower treble. The speed of the 801’s midrange and tweeter as they combine to launch a wave is like nothing I’ve heard. Guitars just glisten, with harmonic trails flowing out behind the initial fundamental in fanned-out hallucinogenic fractals.
My first experience with the 801’s fever-dream midrange and treble came by way of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Do You Love Me?” from Let Love In (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Mute / Tidal). The opening synth and guitar washes shot from the 801s with an electric flash that was almost visible. Those notes had a nearly three-dimensional presence to them, so much so that it almost seemed like there was some sort of signal processing going on with the 801s. It was initially hard to reconcile.
As I listened and thought about it more, I began to get the measure of what was going on. There’s a slight rise in the midrange that could easily be problematic, but is far from troublesome here.
Look. I have a big problem with a rising upper midrange. I’m easily irritated by peaks or glare in that region, and over my time reviewing for SoundStage! it’s been something that I dread experiencing in a piece of review gear. On those reviews where I’ve had to sit through a peaky upper midrange, I’ve been forced to dig down and find the fortitude to listen around that sort of artifact. Here though, there was such speed and clarity to the midrange that it sounded like a sort of soft, fluffy cotton candy, like silky, creamy meringue, with a crisp outer shell that exploded with sugar crystals that melted as they struck my ears.
What the hell am I talking about here?
It sounds, to my ears anyway, like there’s a complete lack of distortion across the entire midband, combined with a seamless transition at the crossover point into the lower treble. Added to that is what seems like extremely linear off-axis response, which may well explain the holographic imaging that the 801s infused my room with. And speed—instant acceleration and deceleration. Yes, there’s a small, audible rise in the upper midrange, but it’s so incredibly clean and listenable that it’s a feature, not a bug.
A few days before wrapping up this review, I attended the opening of David Scott’s art show at a swanky, Grey-Poupon art gallery in a high-end area of Toronto. Dave is a longtime friend of mine—we spent much of our late teens and early 20s hanging out, and I spent a lot of that time watching him paint. He’s an incredible artist, and I urge you to check out his website. At the show, I had the chance to reconnect with several old friends whom I hadn’t seen in years. One of those was Harkness, a musician whom I wrote about a couple of years back when he released his new album. When I got home that day, one of the first things I did was slap The Occasion (LP, Windchild Records Wcr001lp) onto the VPI Prime Signature and spin it up.
The Occasion is dense as all get-out, featuring orchestral breaks interspersed with incredibly catchy hooks that swoop in from left field and set themselves real deep. The title track, “The Occasion,” goes every which way, with instruments snapping out from the edges, and the 801s did tricks with them. I heard a huge—huge, I tell you—soundstage, with Harkness’s guitar holding down the center. That snappy, expressive midrange placed trombones both left and right, so far to the sides that they sounded like they were beyond the outer edges of the speakers. Other little aural flourishes—and there were many—flitted between the speakers, showing remarkable variety in depth and position. Again, the term holographic came to mind.
That’s two highly produced studio albums so far. Switching over to jazz, I dug out an old favorite of mine, a reissue of Chet Baker’s Chet (LP, Riverside / Analogue Productions APJ 016), which is the juiciest-sounding album I own. Whenever I play this album, it sounds like I’ve swapped the Hegel H30A solid-state amp for a single-ended 300B tube amplifier. This lovely music is full of harmonic overtones on Baker’s trumpet and Pepper Adams’s baritone sax. There’s no shortage of high frequencies on this album. It sounds to me like the overtones on Baker’s trumpet span the midrange-to-tweeter crossover frequency. Here I could definitely notice some additional energy in this region. Baker’s spitty, breathy trumpet tone came forward a touch—not in space, as it remained in the plane of the speakers, but sounding just a bit higher in level than I’m used to. Despite the additional presence, that trumpet was clear, expressive, and utterly without grain.
Back to studio stuff. The artist for Space Groove (16/44.1 FLAC, Discipline Global Mobile / Tidal) is listed by Tidal as King Crimson, but it’s really an offshoot, a side project of Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp called ProjeKct Two. Close enough for the girls we go out with, I guess. Anyway, it’s Fripp on guitar, Belew on drums, and Trey Gunn on guitar synth, and it’s a rollicking, beat-heavy jam session. Fripp’s guitar is on fire here, with an incendiary attack and echoing harmonics that go on forever. Here’s another example of the 801’s imaging trickery. Those harmonics wrapped themselves around my ears, around the back of my head, ricocheting around the room in a hallucinogenic manner. I could taste them, see their colors.
Now I need to tell you about the bass. The two 10″ woofers in each 801 Signature fit into my room like butter melting on toast. The 801s generated effortless bass, perfectly tailored to the source material. On Chet, Paul Chambers’s upright bass filled the room, rolling out from the speakers with power, depth, and precision. Switching over to a band about which I know absolutely nothing, Roon Radio served me up Black Midi’s Hellfire (16/44.1 FLAC, Rough Trade / Tidal), which seems like a more listenable Mr. Bungle. Lots going on here, a busy avant-garde, math-rock mashup, but what’s most relevant right now is the low end. “Dangerous Liaisons” really caught my ear, with the 801s doing that wall-to-wall spread thing, letting me hear each cymbal crash, the trumpet’s bark, and what else I can only guess. And here the bass was tight and deep, with just the right amount of juiciness, the right dose of rich pudding—not too much, not sloppy or loose in any way. The initial edge of sharp bass transients was quick, like the twitch that interrupts a very light sleep. Behind that leading edge, the 801 Signatures fed a world of texture into each low-end note.
And from the bass, right up through the midbass, the 801’s low end proved the perfect foil for that expressive, lightning-bolt midrange. In some ways the entire frequency range, and the presentation of the 801s, is larger than life. These speakers inject energy, wild lightning, and deep thunder into the music, but they do it proportionally.
This sense of overall enhancement is a tricky balance. If any region wasn’t perfectly right, it would throw off the balance of the speaker, making it feel like you were listening to a Looney Tunes cartoon. But with the 801, there was a harmonic precision, a feeling of each part of the speaker working in lockstep to back up each other part. So there’s a crisp midrange, an extended, silky treble that—I know this sounds obvious, but it’s really important here—rises up seamlessly from the upper mids, and walloping, rich, defined bass.
More about that bass. The 801s were low-frequency chameleons. Those four woofers had the potential to overload my room, but they never did. On the other hand, they loaded it up so well that the entire room shook with an intensity that I’ve rarely experienced. Most importantly, though, the 801s could do all of that simultaneously—so much bass that it was almost too much, but it never crossed the line.
We live to survive our paradoxes
I had quite a few people through this room while the 801 Signatures were here. Some of them I dragged downstairs for a listen even though they weren’t audiophiles. Others came out of the woodwork when word got out that these world-class speakers were in the house.
With one exception, these other listeners were as gobsmacked as I was. Much headshaking; obvious awe. Only one person wasn’t totally sold on the 801s. That one exception found the upper midrange and treble a touch too forward. I can see how that might happen. Like I said earlier, there is some excess midrange energy going on with this design, and the highs do sparkle, there’s no doubt. So someone very sensitive to these regions might be pushed into sensory overload and find a pair of 801 Signatures slightly on the aggressive side.
Then again, some people find butter chicken too spicy. And that’s OK—to each their own. I guess the takeaway is that if you’re looking for a laid-back, relaxing speaker, maybe the 801 Signature isn’t for you. But if you want to be astonished each time you sit down to listen to your system, if you want to immerse yourself in music, have it wrapped around you, be able to see it and even taste it, then perhaps this is the speaker you’ve always wanted but never thought existed.
I expected that the 801 Signature would be an excellent speaker—Bowers & Wilkins has been at this a long time and has copious resources—but I had no idea it would be this good. Back around the turn of the century, I received a pair of free tickets to see the Rolling Stones here in Toronto. They were excellent seats, and I thought, why not? They were old back then and likely washed up, just doing it for the paycheck, or so my thinking went. I entered that show with my arms crossed, expecting a bit of an eye-roller. Holy hell, was it a fantastic show. Jagger was a powerhouse, Richards smoked it on guitar, and I was amazed at how they could still throw down even though they were the same age as my parents.
I felt the same incredulity when I first fired up the 801 Signatures. From the opening notes that these speakers played, I was captivated. They’re still in my room as I type this last sentence, and the Tragically Hip are playing “Fiddler’s Green” from their masterpiece Road Apples (24/96 FLAC, Universal Music Canada / Tidal). I just don’t want this song to end.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Analog source: VPI Prime Signature turntable; European Audio Team Fortissimo S turntable, European Audio Team Jo N°8, DS Audio DS 003, Charisma Audio Signature Two cartridges
- Digital source: Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Meitner Audio MA3
- Phono preamplifiers: Aqvox Phono 2 CI, iFi Audio iPhono3 Black Label, Hegel Music Systems V10, EMM Labs DS-EQ1, Meitner DS-EQ2
- Preamplifier: Hegel Music Systems P30A
- Power amplifier: Hegel Music Systems H30A
- Integrated amplifiers: Hegel Music Systems H120, Eico HF-81
- Speakers: Focus Audio FP60 BE, Estelon YB, Aurelia Cerica XL, Totem Acoustic Sky Towers, Børresen X6
- Speaker cables: Audience Au24 SX, Nordost Tyr 2, Crystal Cable Art Series Monet
- Interconnects: Audience Au24 SX, Furutech Ag-16, Nordost Tyr 2, Crystal Cable Diamond Series 2
- Power cords: Audience FrontRow, Nordost Vishnu
- Power conditioner: Quantum QBase QB8 Mk.II
- Accessories: Little Fwend tonearm lift, VPI Cyclone record-cleaning machine, Furutech Destat III
Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 Signature loudspeaker
Price: $55,000 per pair
Warranty: Five years, parts and labor
B&W Group, Ltd.
Dale Road, Worthing
West Sussex BN11 2BH
England, UK
Phone: +44 (0)1903-221-800
Bowers & Wilkins North America
5541 Fermi Ct. N.
Carlsbad, CA 92008
Phone: (800) 370-3740
Website: www.bowerswilkins.com
