NOV/21
Speakers come and speakers go, but every five or six years the perennial refresh of Bowers & Wilkins’ flagship 800 series marks a high point of excitement in the audiophile calendar. Due, in no small part, to ‘that which shall not be named’ the build-up to launch was more of a slow burn this year and the international press gathering necessarily rather subdued. None of which should detract from the achievements, more remarkable than ever under the circumstances, of B&W’s talented and surprisingly varied engineering team. These latest ‘D4’ variants of the seven-strong 800 series feature hundreds of detail improvements together with a handful of new innovations that, once appreciated, immediately provoke the question ‘I wonder why no-one had thought of doing that before?’. Such moments are rare in hi-fi…
