OP
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- #521
Not very flat. And also different from previous versions. So we see that they don't have really a house curve target, each iteration seems kind of random. Strange.
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Because they are marketing rather than measurement driven.
Keith
Keith
I'm not a measurements guru, but shouldn't these sound bright, based on these measurements?
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Have you ever compared the top B&W models to your shop of fantastic speakers?
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Soundstage Network's NRC measurements for the 805 D4 are up before the review. The response is definitely... interesting.
And the Listening Window
On the plus side, props to B&W for doing the closest thing to a 'Batman' frequency response I've seen yet, ears and all:
In all seriousness, horizontal directivity looks decent, I think. Hard to tell for sure without tracing the data. B&W tends to have completely different directivity even among speakers in the same family though, so I wouldn't extrapolate this to the other models. *shrugs*
And the Listening Window
On the plus side, props to B&W for doing the closest thing to a 'Batman' frequency response I've seen yet, ears and all:
In all seriousness, horizontal directivity looks decent, I think. Hard to tell for sure without tracing the data. B&W tends to have completely different directivity even among speakers in the same family though, so I wouldn't extrapolate this to the other models. *shrugs*
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Soundstage Network's NRC measurements for the 805 D4 are up before the review. The response is definitely... interesting.
And the Listening Window
On the plus side, props to B&W for doing the closest thing to a 'Batman' frequency response I've seen yet, ears and all:
In all seriousness, horizontal directivity looks decent, I think. Hard to tell for sure without tracing the data. B&W tends to have completely different directivity even among speakers in the same family though, so I wouldn't extrapolate this to the other models. *shrugs*
Very interesting response. Thanks for posting. Directivity looks pretty good. 803D4 probably has the best directivity, given the 3 way design with decreasing size for each way. That's actually the one I want to see measured on the NFS the most, as I think it has the best chance of doing actually pretty well. 802 and 801 will show directivity errors, but they could still measure a bit flatter than the 805(if it's the same as the D3 gen), due to being 3 way. 804 to me seems like the ugly duck. Tower speaker, but no separate midrange enclosure. I'd skip it and save for the 803(or 802/1
).
Before I started PA I owned initially the 802 and then 800’s they were the first versions with the ‘marlon’ heads, I didn’t know any better.
Keith
I find it a bit distasteful when retailers write negative comments about competing products that they do not carry.
I only represent measurement led designs, heaven knows it would be wonderful to have a ( measurement led) U.K loudspeaker design here.
Keith
atsmusic
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I'm glad I didn't know any better when I bought my 802Ns. Got a good twenty years of immense joy out of them. I find it funny because you didn't like them, you think they are bad. Did you not listen to them before you bought them? Why did you buy them if they were so bad? And then you also bought the 800s, wow.
I believed the marketing and to my shame I didn’t know any better.
Keith
Keith
I have studied the frequency response of the 805D4 in detail over the last few days and can only partially agree with your statement. Especially in the low frequency range, the Batman target is clearly missed. I don't want to offend you, but it's a complete mystery to me how you could have missed that - B&W fan boys are probably everywhere.
Here is my extensive frequency response research as proof - these studies are my legacy to future generations and I cannot laugh at all when inaccurate reports are made in this regard.
DSJR
Major Contributor
I'm not saying who posted it, but on a private forum for a well established vintage UK brand (not the HUG!), a US based reviewer really piled into the Toole/Harman 'way of doing things.' He kind of lost what little respect I had for him really, but one point was assertively made in that the lower kHz region is often DELIBERATELY depressed a little and for various reasons, not just to compensate for less good drivers or crossovers - something to do with 'diffused field' listening, whatever that means (my bad interpretation I suspect. Reference to Siegfried Linkwitz's site and his writings was made...
I do remember the ancestral 801's especially (plus the M801 and M805 version) as being quite good and rather above the grotty vinyl systems we used back then.
I do remember the ancestral 801's especially (plus the M801 and M805 version) as being quite good and rather above the grotty vinyl systems we used back then.
Not bad but you should definitely work on the set up. Punchline was good.
Pearljam5000
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Wow I never knew the 800 series is so polarizing
Please apply this to the JBL 4309 too, this could be the missing preference curve that explains the miracle in the other thread!
As fun as it is to mock the LW and off-axis response curves, what ultimately matters is the actual in-room response.Soundstage Network's NRC measurements for the 805 D4 are up before the review. The response is definitely... interesting.
And the Listening Window
On the plus side, props to B&W for doing the closest thing to a 'Batman' frequency response I've seen yet, ears and all:
In all seriousness, horizontal directivity looks decent, I think. Hard to tell for sure without tracing the data. B&W tends to have completely different directivity even among speakers in the same family though, so I wouldn't extrapolate this to the other models. *shrugs*
I happen to have in-room measurements of the 805D2 (2 generations older), shown in BLUE below. Perhaps, of interest, I also have in-room measurements of the Revel PerformaBE m126Be, shown in RED. Both were taken in the same room using a calibrated UMIK-1 and an average of 3 readings each.
Even though the on-axis LW FR of the 805D2 is also "bat-wing" (not shown), the actual in-response below is pretty good.
It turns out, the Revel is the one with excessive energy in the midbass region and overall sounded a bit rolled off in the highs in the same room. I actually took these measurements to better understand why the m126be sounded "dull" to me.
Perhaps some food for thought - it's actually pretty difficult to predict the in-room response just by eyeballing a series of FR charts. Just because the tweeter on-axis (or on-axis LW) FR curves look a certain way to you, doesn't mean the actual response will look the same, as this demonstrates.
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It seems the internal JBL research team visited a different nursing home than B&W for the listening experience survey, plus the designers probably forgot to stuff cotton in their ears during crossover tuning and thus totally screwed up the high frequency range - real quality is hard to find.
No offense, my infantile phase is hereby officially over
Can you smooth the frequency responses with 1/1oct, then one can easily see the "average" slope of the FR.
With the Revel, I don't like the hump in the presence range around 2.7kHz.
The 805D2 measures as one would expect if the 805D3 is comparable measurement-wise. Even the listening room can't compensate for the special crossover tuning - which is not to say that you can't like the sound.
