Absolutely. in the same time frame, there are speakers costing a fraction as much (like A/D/S) that had better crossover parts.

I have the 801 Series 2's and I've upgraded many of the crossover parts, but still adhering to the original design. I've improved them greatly. I find mine sound best when raised about 3.5 inches..... on nicely finished 4x4's. I have 6.5" stands for when I was using them on slab floor, but now they are on a raised wood floor, and they sound better raised 3.5".

@@dmahan8841 Well you are incorrect. 801 Matrix Series 1 and 2 were bright and had a beaming quality. The Series 3 which I bought in 1993 did not have this brightness. I had previously owned the 801FS in 1986 which was not bright. I was 32 when I purchased the 801FS. I am a very experienced B&W listener. So your age comment is totally siily. Why did you not ask me why I have not purchased the Natilus or Diamond series?

I have some metal done tweeters. Titanium. Don't sound hard at all. I have some soft done tweeters that are sibilant

@@user-gf7kj5vj3p I moved on to EPOS silk dome tweeter's and they were like the opposite of the B&W tweeter's. Even with 25.00 crossover's the EPOS tweeter's outperformed the B&W's no contest. I'm sure there are some tamed metal domes out there but I have yet to hear them. Besides after learning from Danny. I'm convinced, I don't know shit and have been listening to 25.00 crossover's my entire audio life. I'll be listening to my 1st real crossover as soon as Danny gets done designing them for me. I'm expecting the clouds to part and Angel's to start singing. For now just trying not to feel so stupid. My apologies to anyone who thought I knew something. I just thought I did. I'm learning just like everyone else.

Replace stock crossover Electolitics with quality copper foil cap and these tweeters will lose that shrill zippy sound and will warm up along with not being sibilant ... than do swap the resistors for better ones , than air core inductors and it will complete the transformation . Unfortunately these tweeters are drying out by now and lose output so finding a way to use new tweeter would be great ...

Drying out? You can replace ferrofluid ​@@kdomster9141

And the only way to hear the real difference is to hear it live (and not through a compressed KZfaq video).

@@dannyrichie9743 its better than nothing

​@kkrobertson1 As much as I would love to hear the difference... YT is probably not good enough, though. Add to that... what type of audio equipment are people going to be listening with? They're likely not going to be hearing the live in room sound of the speakers.

They actually sounded quite good at time of release also. These were not some subpar speaker by any means. But 30 year old parts are NOT always the exact same they were when new, so age "could" factor in also.

@kevintomb OH I'm sure they weren't terrible but with what he did and the quality of everything it's probably insanely good now

​@@kevintombI loved these speakers along with the 801s, I couldn't afford either and bought the DM2000, still love them

We designed an upgrade for the B&W 801 Series 80 model.

Steve Albini, who recorded Nirvana, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, etc., used B&W Matrix 805s for his mixing and mastering. I heard some of his masters on those speakers and they sounded amazing.

@@ChicagoRob2 Yep, and the 805's were loaded with budget level parts too.

B&W 801's and 802's have always been reference monitors in Abbey Road studios. You'll see them in all the pics and videos shot there. However, engineers working there may choose to use any number of near field monitors as primary mixing monitors.

I believe Lucas Films Studio had the Nautilus 801 or 802 in their studio too.

That’s good to hear. So you really did notice a worthwhile significant improvement just like Danny always says?

@stephenyoud6125 yes, the overall effect was a cleaner, clearer, open dynamic that left me smiling.

@@sloboat55 great to hear, I bought the X-VOCE centre kit for my home cinema

Yup, Ebay is now trending B&W 802 searches......................................

After getting the 1 meter measurements I moved out to 56" away to make sure the results were the same.

Yes....

That was my immediate thought too. It might even be Cu-Ni-Sn, but there's definitely Cu traces under the plating. That's evident from the component side images, where the traces appear brownish through the pale green of the fibreglass substrate.

Even replacing solder from it and replacing with quality one would make a diff in clarity

I pulled it out and checked it. This one is tinned Copper.

Powered speakers typically cannot be upgrades as the crossover is built into the amplifier. Some models do use an amp with a passive crossover but it's pretty uncommon.

You could and it would be an improvement, or you can just swap all of it out for tube connectors and get a much larger improvement.

Actually a flat response is more accurate and it will have a more rolled off in room response. Voicing it down in the off axis will cause too much of a drop to the in room response. So these will not at all sound bright. The Dunlavy's have a crapload of felt around the drivers to kill any off axis response. So they sound very similar in any room they are in, but you have to stay on axis and keep them pointed at you head for them to work.

@@dannyrichie9743 No the opposite is true for the treble. A room's reverberant qualities always energizes treble frequencies more so than the midrange. You may be thinking of bass frequencies below 100 hz or so as they get boosted by boundary reinforcement (floor and walls). But above above that there is definitely a brightening trend in room unless the room is heavily damped which most people don't have. Anechoic or acoustically dead rooms always sound dimmer at treble frequencies than rooms with any amount of reflective surfaces.

​@@socksumiI would have thought a typical listening room with drapes, furniture, carpets, and sundry other items would such out some of the treble?

Tapered tubes.

@@RennieAsh : Yes, something like that is what I'm picturing. Just makes perfect sense for an enclosure without the box.

One this one we started at 1 meter to get a reference then moved out to 56".

It's funny how a lot of little things add up to not being so little anymore, and thanks for posting the feedback on the tube connectors.

They had their own anechoic chamber in the late 70s.

Our new room will be better.

Notice how far back the woofer pod is located on top of the lower cabinet for time alignment

@@CashGravel Good point, that comes into play as well.

There is always a baffle step loss to contend with. It just happens at lower frequency with a bigger baffle. There is a great benefit to minimum baffle... .the sound is very open and less "boxy".

@@TheMirolab and yet I’ve heard open baffles that sound absolutely stunning with fairly large baffles. I switched to Maggie’s for now lol

Everything that you have learned about passive speakers regarding parts quality, also applies to active speakers. Most commercially available active speakers are bottlenecked by crappy amps too.

@@dannyrichie9743 I see, so is it possible to get good results with active speakers or is it always limited to the quality of the dsp board? I've been considering making a new pair of speakers, small ones that I would really struggle to fit a passive crossover into, would it be better to have an external passive crossover or go down the active route instead?

@@damienwright2483 Doing an active system right is a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive.

@@dannyrichie9743 personally I prefer passive speakers, and I'm not sure I have the tools to learn to do it properly if it isn't straight forward, maybe in the future, but following your comment I'll probably stick to passive anyway 😆, thanks 👍

Nothing with the woofers, might do a little with the mid, though seeing as they are wire frame it may not have as much as an impact as many solid MDF frames

The grills are only removable from the mid and woofer,. Due to the low frequencies and good frame design, they do not affect the sound at all.

Some people like colored speakers.

@@ChicagoRob2 Just as well as all speakers are colored. The least colored being a Quad electrostatic, nothing in a box comes close.

for larger speakers like this I refence the level at 1 watt/1 meter them move further away for additional measured responses and design work.

We'll have the price of the upgrade kit on the website by Monday.

We use it to cover any panel that is also an exterior wall. Covering the center of each panel is a must. Panels are most resonant at the point furthest from each edge or brace.

Using similiar materials in vehicles I would say yes as a general rule you want as large of piece as possible starting from the center of an area. You also want a firm application. Using a roller is best. I have also used car products inside and outside of speakers with reasonably good results. Very much dampens the sound to make the speakers sound bigger and cleaner, albeit everything is a trade off for something. The big question is what is the trade off. Depends on the speaker and the use.

I think Danny was referring to this 802 specifically, as the internal Matrix bracing is very extensive! Look up some old promo pictures. I don't think the cabs need it. They are super solid, and he does not mention the "Fibercrete" midrange enclosure which is extremely dense & heavy.

The crossover parts were probably not up to GR standards, but the designs and drivers were very good. My Matrix 805s only have six parts, but are able to deliver a +/- 1.75 dB response(as verified by anechoic charts supplied with my speakers).

@@ChicagoRob2 It is hard to say that the parts quality really reached anyone's standards. They used the cheapest parts there was.

If someone wants to send us one, we will. We've already looked at the L600 but not the R600.

Well it's already travelled through thousands of components in the studio, and then your CD player and then your amplifier.

Complete systems like that are a hard sell. Most that have been released use cheap D/A converters and amps. So they are bottlenecked pretty hard and far from the top levels of performance. Doing it right with high quality gear gets extremely expensive.

@dannyrichie9743 - If your wattage and noise levels in your class-D amps are at acceptable specs, you won't call the sound you get "bottlenecked". ABX experiments long ago proved "high end" class-AB amps are not any better than well designed, cheap class-D amps. Home Theater seems to always beat the classic music audio standards. Movie sound in general dispenses with the fairy dust witchcraft nonsense of the high-end music equipment hobby and gets down to real world sound production where it counts. Cost efficiency on amplification and signal processing while standardizing the source studio art sound production stage itself with proper mixing, mastering and sound stage controls. There is a reason movie soundtracks obliterate dynamically squeezed music production. Notice how no speaker reviewers talk about SPL, dynamic punch, peak SPL output distortion, etc. Because typically music based hifi audio is overpriced and inferior. Hell, even car audio has better design standards from a signal standpoint due to fully active crossovers, DSPs and individual driver amplification. The 2-channel music hifi hobby is still operating with a 1960s mindset. It's time to modernize. Save money on areas where you get no real audible gain (amplifiers, preamplifier, DACs) and put the money to work getting a perfect crossover network (without the passive limitations of frequency drift at high outputs), higher distortion-free SPL at the listen position, deeper bass response, better cabinet shaping and bracing, etc.

@@timothys9288 I am sure you read all of that somewhere on the Internet, but none of it is true.

Top secrete new model that sets a new standard for vocal accuracy, and imaging. Stay tuned.

About half of them.

@@dannyrichie9743 Worked on these and early KEFs with a similar unnecessary protection circuit in line. Why manufacturers put this junk in the signal path is beyond me. They know its wrong. Great work Danny

@@haycrossaudio5474 They have to weigh up the chances of drivers being destroyed under warranty by idiots with weedy amps. Yes , it's not theoretically good for the sound but studios and headbangers do abuse the speakers. I had a customer who fried 3 pairs of Wharfedale 507's in one day and we had to keep giving him a new pair under warranty. You can go out of business very quickly with people like that. Repaired or not, they're an open box product. The voice coils of the bass drivers were welded to the pole piece, and the plastic cones had melted. The tweeter inductors had melted too. A bad idea? maybe not.

We've upgraded a few of their crossovers.

We have worked on that model.

@@dannyrichie9743 do you have a crossover kit available for those i know I'm going to have to rewire the pair I have and add new biding post i have the s2 versions

He said the same thing about some elac towers I had. Simply replacing the parts was too costly if he just use the original design, which was fine I think in this case he totally redesigned every part of the crossover so he could control that better.

The new parts would take up to much of the inside. The capacitors and AirCore inductors would not fit. He talked about a external crossover, but the parts count would push the price thru the roof.

The reason was there appeared to be a lot of notch filters being used to control the drivers problems. Drivers with that many parts parts often need that many parts to fix all of those issue. In this case the crossover wasn't that complex but they used a lot of parts in two protection circuits that were really not necessary.

@@CashGravel The Elac towers used some really large value caps in the circuit to limit the range of the lower woofers while allowing the upper to play up to the tweeter. Some of those big valued caps (and coils) would still be needed even if I redesigned it. Those big values really add up cost wise even if just using budget level poly caps. I think there were a few 200uF values needed. That really makes the upgrade costly. At some point it makes more sense to just build a new speaker. I tend to use our X Series models as a benchmark too. If it is cheaper to just build out one of those models and the end result is far better than the cost of polishing something that will never reach that performance level, well then, it just isn't worth it.

@@dannyrichie9743 yes I remember you telling me that. Got lucky and sold them for a good price.

Or I could just shift the mid-bass woofer to one side like the Brute and Bully.... Those worked out great.

@@dannyrichie9743 But midrange woofer in small box with tweeter on top with air around makes it even less diffraction for amazing imaging and airy soundstage ... that was the whole point of this B&W design ...

Nope, crossovers are specific to each speaker.

I try to make them accurate on and off axis (as much as possible). Toe in has as much to do with room treatment or room acoustics as much as anything.

@@dannyrichie9743 and what’s happening high up? Whether theres still a bit of treble lift or drop off?

It is a three way design.

@@dannyrichie9743 oki. Thanks maestro. 👍

@AN-ce1nd Good one

Send one in.

I had a pair of 1979-vintage B&W DM6s, which were one of the first time-aligned speakers. They sounded really good.

I'd prefer silence to the new diamond.

I can't imagine it sounding great with that level of parts in the signal path.

@@dannyrichie9743 The 802 S3 were in my system for a few years. Similar cheesy crossover inside. They sound a bit small and congested. I heard the 801 S3 before (in a different room) and they sounded bigger, more macho, more dynamic. Was hoping the 802's would have more or less the same sound but they didn't. I do expect your new crossover to be a big improvement. BTW, the 802's are great for near field listening. Sit in front of them at 1 meter / 3 feet and you'l hear incredible detail from each recording. Like listening to headphones but with added depth, slam, and soundstage.