As you may have read last month, I’ve embarked on a project in which I’m trying to replicate a pair of Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 Signatures on a budget. If, that is, you can call somewhere around half the retail price of $55,000 a budget (all prices in USD). In the next step of this noble pursuit, I busted open the newly arrived pallet containing a pair of B&W 805 D4 Signatures, matching stands, and two DB2D subwoofers. My neighbor Ron helped me with this, while my other regular helper, Rob, was incapacitated by the flu. Ron rarely asks for anything, being more than happy just to help out and involve himself with my high-end audio affliction.
This time, though, he looked at me all sad-like, and came close to begging (although it was much more dignified than that) for first crack at the 805s. Ron had been utterly smitten with the 801s—more so, he told me, than with anything else in recent memory.
I get a ton of extremely cool gear through here, and it’s easy to be magnanimous. And I could still be scientific, I told myself, by setting up the DB2D subs in my room and evaluating them before integrating the 805s. So with the help of my girl Dolly, we wheeled in the DB2Ds and decanted them from their boxes.
The DB2D is second from the top in Bowers & Wilkins’s subwoofer lineup. Retailing for $4499, this is a premium product, and it looks the part. Beautifully finished in piano-black gloss lacquer, the DB2D is as elegant as it possibly can be, given that this is a plain, black cube. The horizontally opposed, force-cancelling woofers are the same Aerofoil drivers used in the 801, and Bowers & Wilkins specifies the ‑3dB point at 10Hz. The company does not specify the amplifier’s power, but it does note that it’s a class-D amplifier, and equalization and filtering are enabled via DSP.
My room is tightly packed with gear, furniture, and shelves. Measuring around 15′ × 18′, it’s not a large space, but it’s well damped, and the staircase leading up and the hallway toward the bathroom seem to serve as a kind of bass trap or massive port or something. I’ve had some huge speakers in here, and it’s really hard to overload the low end. The only speaker that’s made it sound too fat down in the bottom was the DALI Epikore 11, with the pair sporting a total of eight 8″ rear-ported woofers.
The 801s sounded great. Maybe a smidge warm, but likeably so. The total of four 10″ woofers seemed optimal for my room, so I had high hopes for the DB2Ds, which use the same number and type of drivers. But I don’t have much manoeuvring room, which means there’s not much flexibility for subwoofer placement. So after Ron and I had unboxed the DB2Ds, I walked them into the spots that made spatial sense—one on each side of my equipment rack. This meant I had one sub behind each of my Aurelia XO Cerica XL speakers. But my Hegel Music Systems H30A amp was sitting right where the left sub needed to go, and it’s a heavy mofo. So, with Rob out of action, and Ron’s back being about as bad as mine, Ron and I lifted each side of the amp in turn and slid a towel underneath. Then I pulled the amp over to the middle-front of the room like I was dragging a body into the woods.
I ran single-ended Nordost Tyr 2 interconnects from the Simaudio Moon Evolution 740P preamp to each sub, and plugged the subs into the wall using the supplied power cords. The DB2Ds don’t have external controls. There’s only a single power button on the front, which brings each unit out of standby mode. So I downloaded Bowers & Wilkins’s DB Sub app and paired each sub in turn. There’s a whole bunch of functionality here, but I started out with a simple Hail-Mary configuration. The app provides the ability to match the subs to a specific speaker, and it lists a whole bunch of Bowers & Wilkins models, but none from other manufacturers. I took a quick look at the specifications of the Aurelia, and its bass extension wasn’t too far off that of the 805, so I chose that speaker. This option set up the crossover point and slope.
After I’d set these parameters, I played some music and adjusted the levels on each sub by ear. These subs are massive and powerful, and the setup options I had chosen seemed to work quite well with the Aurelias. I played through a bunch of my ass-kicking bass tracks: Colin Stetson’s “Awake on Foreign Shores,” ProjeKct Two’s “Space Groove,” and “Purple Hat” by Sofi Tukker. In each of these instances I got the same kind of room lock I’d so loved from the 801’s built-in woofers, along with a good sense of the leading-edge attack that had blended so well with that speaker’s snappy-fast midrange.
At this point, I was totally happy with the DB2Ds’ performance, and settled in to get acquainted with their sound and—because I’m a knob-twiddler—play around optimizing the settings.
I dug deeper into the literature and discovered that the DB2D has built-in room correction. The option didn’t seem to be available from the app on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra phone, but it did appear when I loaded it onto my daughter’s iPhone 15. So, using her device, I started the procedure. The first step involved placing the phone atop the sub, with the microphone facing the driver’s edge. The sub then emitted a sweeping test tone. This, I assume, generated a nearfield measurement to compare to the next series of tones in order to capture the room response.
Next, the app directed me toward the sitting position, and then the sub emitted the same tone. The app repeated this process a total of eight times, with me moving the iPhone around to different positions on my couch.
Measurements complete, the app presented me with a list of bass modes that it would correct. I then repeated the process with the second sub. The whole process, for both subwoofers, took maybe five minutes. The EQ correction points were different for each subwoofer, which makes sense, as they were in totally different positions.
The differences, post-calibration, were startling. I needed to turn the volume up on both subs considerably, which makes sense, as the calibration process removed at least one big peak that had made them sound louder—but peakier and less accurate.
Post-calibration, the Aurelias sounded like different speakers. Larger now, more connected with the bass. In retrospect, pre-calibration I’d been able to hear—or, more correctly, feel—the presence of a subwoofer. The bass peaks had drawn a small amount of attention to the fact that, yes, there were two big, honking subwoofers in the room. After the electronic tune-up, there was, quite literally, nothing that suggested the bass was coming from anywhere other than the Aurelias.
A good example: Talk Talk’s The Colour of Spring (24-bit/96kHz FLAC, Parlophone Records / Tidal) is full of ripe, tasteful bass, courtesy of Paul Webb’s acoustic bass and Lee Harris’s kick drum. Let’s put aside the fact that now I could clearly hear the differences between these two instruments on “Happiness Is Easy.” More importantly, now that the low end was corrected, the bass itself was spread out, wall to wall, so tightly integrated into the soundstage that I had no sense—absolutely none—that it was coming from a different source. Now the Aurelias sounded like massive, world-class, full-range contenders, without apology for their modest size.
After Roon had its way with Talk Talk, it assumed that I wanted to hear a whole bunch of extra-cool ’80s music. I hadn’t ever heard Simple Minds’ “Colours Fly and Catherine Wheel” from New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84) (16/44.1 FLAC, Virgin Records / Tidal). With the DB2Ds posturing up, Derek Forbes’s bass had a rich, lithe depth, with a physical presence that extended well beyond the low frequencies actually contributed by the subs.
Simply put: this is the best bass I’ve yet had in my room. Not the most. Not merely the tightest. No, it’s more than that. It’s like the juicy, whip-crack tight bass of the 801s, sure, but add in a sense of natural integration combined with a feeling of realism that I’ve not experienced before.
Back to the original premise of this project: creating a half-price 801 D4 Signature. I haven’t listened yet to the DB2Ds fronted by the 805 D4 Signatures. That’s going to have to wait until I get back from the Florida International Audio Expo in late February. And that means it’s time to get my passport and Metamucil ready for international travel from my home in Toronto, Canada.
As I was finishing up this editorial, I decided the time was right to retrieve the 805s from Ron. You’ll read about that wrestling match shortly over at SoundStage! Global. The bottom line was that Ron just didn’t want to let them go. It’s one heck of a fun story.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
