Upgrade Plans for B&W 801 Matrix Loudspeaker Crossover
(Revised 8/19/91)
Preliminary Comments
We wrote to Stereophile in December of 1989 informing them (and you) of a design oversight in the
crossover layout of the B&W Matrix 801 speaker. They published our letter and provided copies of our
plans to those who were interested. Later, we investigated the speaker further and detailed the findings of
our circuit analysis in several 1990 Audio Basics issues, providing significant refinements to the cross-
over upgrade. An enthusiastic letter to the editor was published in Stereophile the next year from a
person who had upgraded his speakers per our plans, He noted that we had told him about further im-
provements, but unfortunately these upgrades were never spelled out in detail (except in Audio Basics).
Now B&W has taken note of our improvements themselves and has put all of our upgrades into produc-
tion in the “25th Anniversary Limited Edition” of the 801 and into the 801 Series III loudspeaker. Thus
many 801 Matrix owners may be wondering how they can go about upgrading their existing speakers to
equal the much better performing Limited Edition or Series III models.
We felt that since all a B&W owner needs to do is execute our original simple and very low cost upgrade
to their existing speakers to have essentially the same performance as the new model, we should rewrite
and simplify the upgrade plan to make it easier to follow so more people will actually do it. One note -
the new model does have a ferro-fluid damped tweeter. Our judgement is that the electronic damping our
crossover revision provides does about 95% of the work so that the replacement of the tweeter itself will
be much further out on the cost-benefit ratio curve.
We urge 801 Matrix owners to make these changes. Its easy to do, you will no longer need speaker
stands or an electronic bass filter at all, you don’t need to bi-wire, and you will make a better musical
improvement than buying a new power amplifier. (If you want that too, check with us first!)
