Am I the only one who thinks B&W is mid-fi?


I know that title sounds pretencious. By all means, everyones taste is different and I can grasp that. However, I find B&W loudspeakers to sound extremely Mid-fi ish, designed with sort of a boom and sizzle quality making it not much better than retail quality brands. At price point there is always something better than it, something musical, where the goals of preserving the naturalness and tonal balance of sound is understood. I am getting tired of people buying for the name, not the sound. I find it is letting the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In these times of dying 2 channel, and the ability to buy a complete stereo/home theater at your local blockbuster, all of the brands that should make it don't. Most Hi-fi starts with a retail system and with that type of over-processed, boom and sizzle sound (Boom meaning a spike at 80Hz and sizzle meaning a spike at 10,000Hz). That gives these rising enthuists a false impression of what hi-fi is about. Thus, the people who cater to that falseified sound, those who design audio, forgetting the passion involved with listening, putting aside all love for music just to put a nickle in the pig...Well are doing a good job. Honestly, it is just wrong. Thanks for the read...I feel better. Prehaps I just needed to vent, but I doubt it. Music is a passion of mine, and I don't want to have to battle in 20 yrs to get equipment that sounds like music. Any comments?
mikez
The only B&W speakers I have used are a little set of 550 (6.5 inch woofer in sealed box and titanium dome tweeter). These were when my living accomodations were greatly downsized. I now have an array if three MG 1.6, plus other stuff, and I like that setup.

However, I must say that those little boxes reproduce one thing, a violin, better than any speaker I have ever heard.

Possible reasons are (a) The baffle size is just about the same as a violin. (b) The Titanium tweeter has a slightly metalic sound, that resembles the violin's metal A and E strings (the two highest of four).
original B/W 801 speakers with crossover mods sound simply wonderful..the later 802 was very good, too; but, that was 25 years ago....
FWIW, in response to the original poster's "I am getting tired of people buying for the name, not the sound." I'd just like to say both my wife and I used our ears (and to a certain extent my wife's aesthetic sense!) to decide both our surround sound speakers and hi-fi speakers.
She had never heard of any of the names on offer and I wasn't familair with the brands and in both instances, at our (mid-range) price point the result came out B&W.
I think that Gryphon Speaker systems put Bower and Wllkens to shame as well as several others I have created myself using Seas, Scanspeak, Focal, Accuton, Resonant Engineering, Eton, even some HIVI Research drivers soo many better options in my opinion.