Which brings us back to the Matrix 801. This is not a speaker for those with preconceived notions of what should be, but for those who wish to hear what is. I have yet to hear another…
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Realizing this problem, Bowers uses panels of musicians who have performed in specific recordings to ascertain musical integrity between originals and facsimiles. If they and the recording engineers involved are satisfied that what they hear through the speakers accurately reproduces what occurred in the sessions, he feels that some of the subjectivity connected with loudspeaker design has been eliminated.
This all happened before the optional out board bass-alignment filter (aka equalizer) arrived, or the speakers had been bi-wired. Again, B&W's "option" is a necessity. While I liked the speakers before, the addition of this little black box between preamp and power amp made an enormous difference...for the better. This is the first such device I've heard that doesn't adversely affect the midrange and high frequencies.
B&W has wisely not included hard-wired interconnects, so the audiophile can still use his favorite brand of wiring. What amazed me was how this gizmo improved the…
When it comes to audio, musicians are hard to please. Perhaps that's why so many of them have such poor audio systems; if you can't have it all, why even try? The new 801 is a musician's reference; it simply reproduces music with more immediacy and honesty than anything I (or any of my colleagues) have previously heard. It is quite unlike any other speaker, inasmuch as it goes far beyond any previous design in drawing the listener into the performance, almost as if the listener's ears and microphones were one and the same. My first impression of the sound was one of unrestrained openness,…
Transient attack of the Matrix 801, throughout the entire frequency spectrum, is the most musically accurate and coherent of any speaker I have heard (except for full-range electrostatics). Deep-bass transients are remarkably clear (but not artificially dry), an attribute made evident through the reproduction of the bass drum in the third movement of Frederick Fennell's First Hoist Suite (same as above). While many other full-range speakers have provided me with lots of window-rattling bass response, the Matrix 801 was the first to delineate the type of beater the bass-drum player was using…
And speaking of pitch definition, this is where most speakers fail miserably. Instruments and voices have (or should have) tonal centers that are clearly heard in live performance. But so many speakers scramble this, representing tonal pitch centers on either the high or low side of the sound, producing overly bright or dull sonic distortions (overly sharp pitch appears to the ear as brighter; low pitch as duller). And with most speakers, this pitch distortion is not consistent: characteristics change with each separate driver, causing frequency-related colorations (this is one advantage of…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, reflex-loaded, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (26mm) metal-dome tweeter, 5" (126mm) Kevlar-cone midrange unit, 12" (300mm) high-power polymer-cone woofer. Crossover frequencies: 380Hz and 3kHz. Frequency response: 20Hz-20kHz ±2dB free-field. Sensitivity: 87dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms (not falling below 4 ohms). Amplifier requirements: 50-600W.
Dimensions: 39 11/16" H by 17" W by 22" D. Weight: 110 lbs.
Price: $4500/pair in black ash or walnut, $5200/pair in rosewood. External bass-alignment filter, and pair of 11"…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
Stereophile's analysis of the B&W Matrix 801 was published long before the magazine acquired the DRA Labs and Audio Precision measurement systems used for its loudspeaker reviews. As my wife owns a pair of the big B&Ws, however, I have measured the speaker at various times over the past 13 years. Here, then, is a complete but never-before-published set of measurements to accompany Lewis Lipnick's 1987 review.
At an estimated 87dB(B)/W/m sensitivity, the B&W 801 is average in this respect. But as can be seen from the plots of its impedance…
Note, however, the very even spacing of the contour lines in these graphs, which correlates with the superbly stable and well-defined stereo imaging. Also note the overall well-controlled manner in which the tweeter gets more directional above 8kHz. In conjunction with the slight lack of top-octave on-axis energy, this will make the speaker sound slightly mellow in all but very small rooms.
In the vertical plane (fig.7), the Matrix 801's use of high-order crossover filters makes it fairly insensitive to listener position, the response hardly changing over quite a wide ±10 degrees window…
Modern hi-fi is little more than a way of getting electricity to pretend that it's music. Of course, good source components remain all-important, and even if loudspeakers are imperfect, most of us can find one or two that suit our tastes, if not our rooms and the rest of our gear.
But in between is where the challenge lies, if only because amplifiers really aren't amplifiers at all: They're re-creators. Electricity isn't just their fuel, it's their raw material as well, and rather than make the music on our records louder—which is how the first record players did it—modern amps merely…