Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

The music source was my Roon Nucleus+ feeding audio data over my network to an MBL N31 CD player/DAC, which was connected to a pair of Parasound Halo JC 1+ monoblocks. The speakers were single-wired with AudioQuest Robin Hood cable.

Listening
Listening to the dual-mono pink noise track on the Editor's Choice CD (Stereophile STPH016-2), I noticed too much treble energy. I followed the advice in the manual to toe-in the speakers so that they point at a location just in front of the listening position. This reduced the treble excess sufficiently that I could now hear that the pink noise was reproduced with an uncolored midrange, though there was still some emphasis in a narrow band in the presence region. The image of the pink noise was stable but not quite as narrow as it was with the GoldenEar BRX or KEF LS50 minimonitors.

The 804 D4s reproduced the 1/3-octave warble tones on Editor's Choice down to the 40Hz band, with the 160Hz warble a little too high in level and the 80Hz and 63Hz warbles slightly lower in level than those at either side—all room effects. The 32Hz tone was reinforced by the lowest room mode, and I could still hear the 25Hz warble at my usual listening level, but the 20Hz tone was inaudible. The warble tones sounded clean, which implies low distortion.

The half-step–spaced tonebursts on Editor's Choice spoke cleanly down to 32Hz, the frequency of the lowest one, though those between Middle C (252.63Hz) and the E two steps higher (329.6Hz) were slightly accentuated. Listening to the enclosure's sidewalls and rear panel with a stethoscope while these tonebursts played, I couldn't hear any resonances.

Whether the level of the 804 D4's treble or its upper midrange sounded close to correct depended on the music being played. With recordings that did not have a lot of high-frequency energy, solo piano recordings such as Robert Silverman playing Liszt's Liebestraum on Editor's Choice, for example, my ears settled on the midrange as their reference level. The Steinway D played by Silverman was reproduced without any notes thrust out at me and was clearly set within the acoustic of the Albuquerque church where we had made the recording. And when Silverman hit the low E-flat with the left hand under the high E-flat 7-9 chord in the right hand at measure 58, which leads to the restatement of the melody, the clarity of every note was stunning.

Roon Radio followed the Silverman track with the second Zenph "reperformance" of Sergei Rachmaninoff's arrangement of Fritz Kreisler's Liebesleid, from one of my 2010 Records 2 Die 4, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff (16/44.1k MQA FLAC, decoded by Roon to 24/88.2k, Tidal/RCA Red Seal 748971). The subtle ambience around and behind the Steinway D reproducing piano—controlled by MIDI data derived from the original piano roll—was clearly resolved by the B&W 804 D4s, and as with my Silverman recording, the sound of the piano was reproduced without midrange coloration. Some of the highest notes, however, did sound a tad accentuated.

Staying with Rachmaninoff and the piano but adding an orchestra, I cued up the composer's second Piano Concerto, with Vladimir Ashkenazy accompanied by Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra (16/44.1 ALAC file ripped from CD, Decca 4757550). Again the 804 D4's clarity in the midrange and bass was impressive, allowing the tolling tonics and fifths in the piano's left-hand register to underpin the big tune in the low strings at the start of the work's first movement.

I share Jason Victor Serinus's love for the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's live recital Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: Mahler, Handel & Lieberson (16/44.1 ALAC, ripped from CD, Wigmore Hall Live 0013). Her creamy-toned performance of "E Viva Ancora," from Handel's opera Ariodante, sounded superbly natural. Pianist Roger Vignoles's piano was appropriately set back in the acoustic of London's Wigmore Hall, a venue I used to attend regularly before I moved to the US. It did sound a touch more reverberant than I am used to, however.

The more high-frequency energy there is in a recording, the more likely that the ear will latch on to that as its reference, in which case the 804 D4's upper midrange will start to sound undernourished. This was the case with Giuliano Carmignola playing J.S. Bach's Violin Concerto in E with Concerto Köln (16/44.1 ALAC file, from Archiv 0289 479 2695 5). I love this energetic performance, but the recording is already a little on the thin side.

On the 804 D4s, there wasn't quite enough upper-midrange energy to fully support the solo violin. The sense of space surrounding the ensemble was palpable, however.

While the 804 D4 offers extended low frequencies—the orchestral bass drum in Malcolm Arnold's overture Beckus the Dandipratt, with the composer conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (24/176.4 ALAC file transcoded from WAV, Reference HR-48), was reproduced with wall-shaking weight—the speaker's woofer alignment seems optimized for clarity. Jerome Harris's soft-toned Taylor acoustic bass guitar on "The Mooche," from Editor's Choice, was reproduced with excellent leading-edge articulation. Again, the sense of the surrounding ambience on both the Arnold and Harris tracks was excellent.

Art Baron's trombone on "The Mooche" had a touch more edge to its sound than I am used to, however. I turned to an album I had in heavy rotation in the late 1970s but hadn't listened to in decades: Jackson Browne's Running on Empty (Rhino-Elektra). I love how "The Load Out" segues into that old classic "Stay." I was streaming the 24/192 FLAC files for those tracks from Qobuz. As with the trombone, I was aware of some presence-region emphasis on Browne's vocals, which had me lowering the volume to a more comfortable level. Once I had done that, I was again impressed by the 804 D4's transparent view into the mix.

Summing up
Having visited Bowers & Wilkins's research facility and factory in England, I believe their engineers can design a loudspeaker to sound and measure any way they wish. From my experience, not just with the 804 D4 but with the 705 Signature—where I wrote, "I was surprised how much I enjoyed having the Bowers & Wilkins 705 Signature in my system ... because the speaker's measured performance implies a somewhat 'tailored' sonic character"—both the 804 D4's measurements and its sonic signature indicate that achieving a classically flat and neutral tonal balance à la Floyd Toole's writings was not the design team's primary goal. Instead, clarity, transparency, low-frequency articulation, and the absence of midrange coloration seemed to have had a higher priority.

Even after I had measured this loudspeaker, the issues I found seemed to step out of the way of the music much of the time. Those port resonances seemed to have very little effect on midrange clarity, and while I was occasionally aware that the resonance just below 4kHz was adding some presence-region emphasis, it did not seem to be excited with most recordings. The extreme toe-in recommended in the manual reduced the audibility of the excessive treble, though the speaker's high-frequency balance will make system matching more difficult than usual. And combined with the speaker's high impedance in the mid-treble, it will make tube amplifiers sound overbright.

Overall, however, I found the 804 D4's sound seductive. This is a loudspeaker you need to audition.