The real fact is that Bowers and Wilkins speaker performance never matches that of the JBL or Klipsch already discussed. Their frequency response is far from being linear. Moreover they are more expensive and are hard to drive with some amplifiers, because of their ridiculously designed impedance curves and phase angle responses.
Just look at the serious reviews by Audioholics, ASR and Sound & Vision.
Honestly I felt the same way and always looked past Bowers and Wilkins. Wanted to try cm9 s2 myself in my own environment. Using arcam avr20 and nad m27 power amp. After using for many hours this weekend I’ve changed my attitude towards them. Of course I ran dirac and they really love power. After careful setup, they performed very well.
My at home demo made me want to hear the 700 series. So I went to the store and it wasn’t a perfect test. Jbl, revel and bowers were all in the same room playing on a trinov amp and a trinov altitude 16. They said each pair of speakers in demo room had been optimized to sound their best. I had to take their word for it, and they all sounded great. I like the Jbl a lot, I was just showing how much I liked the others as well.
I like graphs as well, running rew, playing with dirac and dialing in my mini dsp. All that being said it has to sound good at the end. All of the speakers I mentioned did that well, I just liked some more. Bowers isn’t a speaker that I’d just dismiss so fast.
