How neutral is the 805?

[hired goon]

G'day,

I'm currently doing comparisons of the B&W 805 against an Australian-made bookshelf speaker.

One thing I noticed was that the Australian-made speaker seemed somewhat harsher in the mid-range. I asked the manufacturer why this may be so, and his response was that his speakers are "brutally flat across the 500hz to 10khz region", whereas the 805 de-emphasises the mid-range. So what I consider to be a "harsher" mid-range in comparison to the 805 is actually a neutral mid-range.

A quick google reveals a similar response with the 801:

The far-field in-room averaged frequency response is particularly interesting, if not as obviously neutral as one might expect. The broad midband decade is impressively flat, 150Hz-1.5kHz, but there's a quite obvious depression of around -5dB in the presence zone 2-4kHz, while the treble proper stages an equally pronounced recovery above 4kHz. There's also a distinct discontinuity at 2.5-3.5kHz.

Source:

http://www.hifichoice.co.uk/archive/perl/504_printreview.htm

Is there a similar mid-range depression with the 805? Is this what is meant by the B&W "sound" that I've heard about?

I must note that I quite like the 805 sound, but I'm wondering if I'll adjust to (and eventually prefer) the flatter response of the other speakers.

Although I don't know if a perfectly flat response is a good thing -- are mid-range troughs introduced deliberately to counter room reflections?

Any thoughts?

-- Geoff

[greggz]

Having too much time on my hands, I took the frequency response of the N801's and N805's from their respective Stereophile reviews and overlayed them. The N801 is in BLACK and the N805 is in RED



Most notable is that hump in the N805's response between 100Hz and 200Hz. Stereophile described that as a "tweek" to small speaker to try to make it sound like a much larger one.

[greggz]

I was watching "The Surreal Life" (a TV show here in the US on VH1 -- too hard to explain either the show or why I was watching it), regardless, the cast of the show was recording a song at a professional studio and I just happened to notice that the studio was using N805's as their monitors.