Bowers & Wilkins 805 D3

I have had a long relationship with Bowers & Wilkins.

- John Atkinson

The first B&W speaker I spent serious time with was the DM-6, the infamous “pregnant kangaroo,” which was reviewed by Allen Edelstein in December 19771 and which I borrowed for a while after interviewing the company’s founder, John Bowers. Ten years later, when I met the woman who was to become my third wife, she already owned a pair of B&W Matrix 801s, a speaker reviewed by Lewis Lipnick in December 1987.2 Both of these models were floor standers, but the B&W speaker that spent the longest time in my listening room was the stand-mounted John Bowers Silver Signature, which I reviewed in June 1994,3 subsequently purchased, and used as my reference until the magazine relocated from New Mexico to New York in summer 2000. The Silver Signature was launched in 1991, both to celebrate B&W’s 25th anniversary and, as its name also suggests, to pay tribute to John Bowers, who had passed away in 1987.

The Silver Signatures were not as simpatico with my Brooklyn listening room as they had been with my room in Santa Fe, so I stopped using them. However, I’ve always kept an eye and two ears on the brand. Then, at the beginning of summer 2016, I took a train trip to Boston, both to witness the launch of the Diamond Series 800 D3 loudspeaker from Bowers & Wilkins and to celebrate the British speaker maker’s 50th anniversary.