Experience with B&W 703?

Wow! Two very different assessments. I have heard that the 703's sound very forward and harsh until properlly broken-in. I sure hope this is the case, as I have few options.
Thanks for the advice.

2chnlben

It may be that the 703s are very amplifier dependant. That would seem to be the suggestion from the two posts above, and it is something that always comes up with the love-em or hate-em nautilus line from B&W. I'd recommend taking your amplifier along to the dealer when you demo the 703s so you get a better impression.

The thing with audio equipment is that if you taje 10 people and send them out to look at speakers they will all come back with different opinions.

I think it unrealistic to say that a pair of speakers that costs 3K + CDN is a bad speaker.

Consider this if you compare these 3K+ speakers to those from 10 years ago that were 5-10K you will find they perform better in almost everyway.

We need to keep focus. In most cases speakers on show room floors have 40 minutes of play on average because the sales guys do demos once or twice a week for 3 minutes. How can you really judege a speaker under those conditions, a 703 needs 100-200 hours of full bandwidth playing to really perform.

That being said I think for the money there is an incredible amount of technolgy in a 703, and the speaker makes use of all of it.

Thank you skyhawk. I agree with you about the need for a long break-in for speakers, especially the 703. I did think that the dealer's demos were very forward and somewhat harsh sounding. But, then I listened to my co-worker's 703's which he's had for more than seven months, with lots of hours on them, and I thought they sounded very good. So now I'm trying to remember what my co-workers really sounded like. I may have been somewhat infuenced by happy hour at his house, whereas, I was stone-sober at the dealer demo! Thus, my thread on the 703.

I always appreciate the opinion of others. I just hope I can trade the 703's down the road and not lose too much. I never see any 703's listed here. I don't know if that's because no one wants them or if the owners are happy with them and don't want to part with them!!?? I hope it's the later.

Thanks
Cheers
2chnlben

Who knows if the ones that I heard were broken in or not - I really don't know.

However - I would strongly recommend auditioning speakers from other brands before buying the B&W 703, based on the lackluster audition I had with them. I have heard many pairs of ~$500-$1000 speakers that sounded MUCH better than what I heard.