Audiophilepure

https://www.soundstageultra.com/index.php/equipment-menu/1254-bowers-wilkins-801-d4-signature-loudspeaker

The Occasion is dense as all get-out, featuring orchestral breaks interspersed with incredibly catchy hooks that swoop in from left field and set themselves real deep. The title track, “The Occasion,” goes every which way, with instruments snapping out from the edges, and the 801s did tricks with them. I heard a huge—huge, I tell you—soundstage, with Harkness’s guitar holding down the center. That snappy, expressive midrange placed trombones both left and right, so far to the sides that they sounded like they were beyond the outer edges of the speakers. Other little aural flourishes—and there were many—flitted between the speakers, showing remarkable variety in depth and position. Again, the term holographic came to mind.

That’s two highly produced studio albums so far. Switching over to jazz, I dug out an old favorite of mine, a reissue of Chet Baker’s Chet (LP, Riverside / Analogue Productions APJ 016), which is the juiciest-sounding album I own. Whenever I play this album, it sounds like I’ve swapped the Hegel H30A solid-state amp for a single-ended 300B tube amplifier. This lovely music is full of harmonic overtones on Baker’s trumpet and Pepper Adams’s baritone sax. There’s no shortage of high frequencies on this album. It sounds to me like the overtones on Baker’s trumpet span the midrange-to-tweeter crossover frequency. Here I could definitely notice some additional energy in this region. Baker’s spitty, breathy trumpet tone came forward a touch—not in space, as it remained in the plane of the speakers, but sounding just a bit higher in level than I’m used to. Despite the additional presence, that trumpet was clear, expressive, and utterly without grain.

The S2’s three-way Elliptical Symmetry Crossover (ESXO) is a topology of rare distinction. The crossover is implemented with an acoustical-target 24dB-slope using a Linkwitz-Riley filter.

Maximum frequency and phase linearity is accomplished, while keeping intermodulation distortion to vanishing levels. The S2 uses a full complement of state-of-the-art components from Mundorf of Germany, including M-Resist Ultra foil resistors, which deliver greater power handling, increased transparency, and more sonic liquidity than previous components. New is the copper foil paper coil, which improves the noise floor by reducing microphonic effects. The result of the S2’s ESXO crossover is superior coherence from the speaker’s four drive units.