Rod- stepping from the Studios 100's to the Diamond 802's is quite a step up. I look forward to reading your impressions.
Well I finally got them last Tuesday so I have had over a week with them. The first impression. Whoa!. Second impression, my God the clarity! Third impression is that they have such and enormous soundstage which absolutely draws you in giving off a very 3 dimensional experience is that best way I can describe it. I'm a guitar player and this has been my first experience in having the feeling that what I was listening to was so amazingly close to how the real thing sounds it gave me goose bumps. Absolutely incredible. So far I have listened to rock, metal, and classical CDs, watched DVDs with legacy dts and Dolby Digital soundtracks, Blu-ray's with True-HD, HD Master Audio and PCM, SACDs and DVD-Audios. All sound wonderful.
The older v2 Studio 100's that I have were big speakers so the 802s take up a very similar footprint. They are a bit wider and deeper but basically the same height and are 40lbs heavier. I find the bass on the old 100s holds up very well against the 802s as the old v2 100s had 2 large bass drivers so they have similar low level extension with the 802 being more focused. The 802s absolutely destroy my 100s in the mid and treble, there is simple no contest. My dealer says they typically take a good 300 hours to break in so I look forward to them getting even better.
My 4B-SST C-Series is doing a fine, fine job driving the speakers but I would love to have the opportunity to demo the 7B-SST
2 with them or even see what bi-amping with 2 7B-SST
2 amps would do. I could also try using my 2nd 4B-SST which is a non C-Series and run the 2 in bridged mode to see what that is like but I'm in no hurry as I'm enjoying the speakers so much right now.
Rod