B&W 805 D3 Bookshelf speakers (Stunning Stands)

$ 5,999.99 per pair new

Stands R28000!!

It’s a superbly focused image, nicely layered and stable. We listen to Orff’s Carmina Burana and are wowed by this standmounter’s ability to layer the soundstage and locate instruments and voices in specific positions within the sound field.

The sense of openness is impressive, and is in part due to the tweeter’s out-of-cabinet position.

These standmounters sound best when pushed hard. At low volume levels the delivery loses a little too much life for our tastes. It’s something to consider if you tend to play your music quietly.

STEREOPHILE

But I kept returning to the B&W’s magic, uncolored, transparent midrange. With the Pass Labs amplifiers, the string orchestra in Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia sounded gloriously natural, rich, and detailed, with a solidly gutty foundation provided by the cellos and basses. Patricia Barber’s vulnerable contralto in “A Taste of Honey” sent shivers down my spine, as did Robert Plant’s tortured tenor in “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” from How the West Was Won. And again, there was that clarity: the Rhodes piano John Paul Jones plays in the verses of “Loving You” before he switches to Hammond for the guitar solo isn’t that loud in the mix, but was audible enough through the B&Ws to make musical sense.

Summing Up
I very much enjoyed my time with the Bowers & Wilkins 805 D3. It is a superbly engineered, superb-sounding thoroughbred of a speaker. Its transparency, dynamic-range capability, and combination of low-frequency weight and control are something special. That somewhat elevated high treble will make it fussy when it comes to system and room matching, but in the right circumstances—and especially if piano recordings dominate your playlists—this might be all the speaker you’ll need, at a lower price than you might think you have to pay.

To return to the question I posed at the start of this review: Is the 805 D3 the successor to my beloved Silver Signature? For the answer to that question, you’ll have to wait for me to retrieve those quarter-century-old speakers from my storage unit and write about the comparison in a Follow-Up. Stay tuned.