Rod's system (aka Rod#S)

[Rod#S]

Thanks

The tweeters of the 800's are a little shy of 9 feet apart and when sitting dead center on the sofa my head is a little over 9 feet from either 800 tweeter so close to an equilateral triangle.

[Rod#S]

I'm really loving the 800's, a noticeable step up from the 802's. Here are my thoughts over the past couple weeks posted in chronologial order. Starting from the Thursday night when I first started listening.

5/2/2013

I will say this, the soundstage watching the Hobbit was epic, perfectly seamless, I have never had my system blend so well that it was hard to determine where the left/right main sounds transitioned to the surrounds. Boy am I glad for having the 802's as surrounds as I'm sure they are the reason for this. With Paradigm in the surrounds there was apparently a noticeable timbre and performance difference that I obviously wasn't aware of. Even when I had the all Paradigm system my surrounds consisted of ADP's and my rears Studio 60's so the difference in transitions was always noticeable, not huge but discernible probably because the 60's were a lot more capable speaker then the small ADP's.

5/5/2012

I finally had some real quality time with the 800's today and I am very impressed. These things have some serious, serious bass capabilities when running full range and it's no wonder owners report not needing a subwoofer if using in a non home theater environment. I know 802 owners even run stereo without a sub and I can attest to them having very solid and tight bass but the 800's are definitely a step up. I know what the specs say and the 800's and 802's have ridiculously close numbers on paper but this is a phenomenon where you need to use your ears and forget about the specs because depending on the song you could easily be fooled into thinking a sub, or stereo subs were in the system. My 800's are in the exact same position that my 802's were and there is no mistaking the difference.

Moving onto the mids I find them to be very smooth, warm and fluid. they obviously posses the accuracy of the 802's but deliver it with a warmer presentation. I had reported after listening to the Focal Alto Utopia a few weeks back how warm and fluid the mids were compared to the 802's, the 800's are giving what I heard from the Alto's.

I'm practically equally as impressed with the surround experience the 800's and 802's give. As reported earlier the soundstage and sense of integration is just amazing. This obviously could have been achieved by buying another pair of 802's, no doubt about it so with me having had no intention of selling the 802's anyways it's a win win in the end.

So what about the HTM2 It still holds it's own in the setup especially when the center is strictly dialog but with the 800's and 802's working in harmony with music it does stand out more then it did when my surrounds were Paradigm Studio 100's probably because the HTM2 is a better speaker in the mids and highs with the low end advantage going to the 100's.

5/14/2013

So I got to sit down for a soild 45 minutes with my 800's last night. I listened to the new Joe Satriani album in 2 channel analog bypass. The soundstage from the 800's over the 802's is just immense, I mean the sound is everywhere. A typical saying for a good speaker is that it pulls you into the performance but this is different you are not pulled in you so much as you are enveloped by it. It was uncanny by times because I know if I was blind folded and couldn't see the display of my SSP to see what mode was selected, if I was asked which speaker(s) is the sound coming from I could easily be fooled into thinking all speakers were at work because there were times in the songs where I could have sworn the surround 802 speakers were outputting sound. The 802's never pushed the music so far into the room, they retained a separation of the front listening environment from going into the back of the room giving the impression that if you wanted complete immersion the surround speakers would need to be engaged via Logic 7, etc. to be completely enveloped by the music.

5/15/2013

I just had another solid hour and a half listening session. I decided to see how the 800's perform with female voices this time. I let my CD player do the work this time so no analog bypass but I was listening in stereo again. I'm still listening to rock albums for the time being, the two I chose were Evanescence's most recent album and Lacuna Coil's Shallow Life disc 2. I find both Amy Lee and Cristina Scabbia to have very powerful voices with Amy's having a very haunting nature to it by times.

So again simply incredible projection of sound. The music is just so balanced from top to bottom, incredibly smooth through the mids with powerful tight bass. The acoustic tracks on the Lacuna Coil disc were surreal, the 802's blew me away when it came to letting me feel like the performers were playing in my room but the 800's step it up a notch, no doubt about it.

[chessman]

Rod#S, HUGE congrats!

[Rod#S]

Thanks

I'm so happy I took the gamble and went with the 800's over another pair of 802's. I know the room can play a huge part in what we hear from a speaker which may explain why there are so many mixed reviews when people demo at a dealers and compare to the 802's but based on my experience over the past couple weeks those who have written off the 800's as just 802's in a larger cabinet without bothering to listen to them or heard them and didn't hear much if any difference between the 802's have done themselves a bit of disservice if they had the money for the 800's.
I'm not going to make comparisons to other speaker manufacturers but the 800's do go above and beyond the 802's and this is coming from a guy who absolutely loves the 802's and will most likely purchase another pair for the rear surrounds if I get back to a 7.1 setup.

[tweet]

Rod,

Thanks for taking the time to post listening impressions of your new 800 Diamonds. I'm seriously considering going the same route. Over the past few months, I've been assembling a "den" system and plan to use my 805 Diamonds for that setup and add 800D's to the front of my listening room. The 802Ds will become surrounds. Looking at your setup and following your posts is certainly not helping the resistance.

Congrats on the setup. I look forward to future impressions.

[Rod#S]

Originally Posted by tweet

Rod,

Thanks for taking the time to post listening impressions of your new 800 Diamonds. I'm seriously considering going the same route. Over the past few months, I've been assembling a "den" system and plan to use my 805 Diamonds for that setup and add 800D's to the front of my listening room. The 802Ds will become surrounds. Looking at your setup and following your posts is certainly not helping the resistance.

Congrats on the setup. I look forward to future impressions.

Thanks

So was the plan all along to move the 805's to the den or were you perhaps just considering buying a 2nd pair specifically for the den and leaving the theater as is? Were you tossing around any other B&W speaker choices for the theater other than making the move up to the 800's, like keeping your 802's up front and just reaplacing the 805's with say 804's or 803's or even another pair of 802's? Since we both own 802 Diamonds we know what a great pair of speakers those are and my original intent when I bought mine a couple years ago was to add a 2nd pair and eventually a 3rd pair to complete a 7.1 setup.

It's cool to hear that if you go with the 800's you will be keeping your 802's for surround duty. Not many people would do that and the 802's typically just become a downpayment on the 800's as most don't put much importance into surround speakers which is something I can see for strictly home theater use. I find it's an entirely different story for discrete multi-channel music or when listening to stereo music with matrix processing both of which I do a lot.

[Rod#S]

I finally figured out a good place to stand in order to get both 800's in one shot. The angle sucks but better then nothing I guess.

[Rod#S]

Two new arrivals, a beautiful pair of 28's. Apologies for the very poor picture quality. I'll try and take some better ones later.

I'm loving the blue LEDs and of course loving the sound too

[tweet]

Rod,

Congratulations on the new Bryston amps! Great looking gear.

You realize you're going to need a bigger boat if you don't stop?

[Rod#S]

lol...I love that, yeah, I passed that point years ago, this is a horrible addiction but I love it.
At least with the 28's I'm not going to need anything more powerful, the amps are spec'd at 1245 watts and 1246 watts. I do like the thought of replacing the 6B with 3 7B's though. But first things first, the next purchase has to be cables, I want to separate the two 28's, I'll put the one on top on the other side of my center but in order to do that I need longer interconnects and possibly longer power cords. As it is right now with only 1 meter PBJ's, the cables don't even touch the ground, they just barely reach from the back of the MC-12 to the two 28's. I also want to put the 28's on Solid Tech ROS 1 Regular stands.