Bowers & Wilkins at 60: What Changed From the 800 D4 to the 800 Series Diamond D5

The B&W 800 Series began with a bequest. In 1966 a wealthy customer and former opera singer known as Miss Knight died and left £10,000 to John Bowers, who ran a radio and television shop in Worthing, on England's south coast, with Roy Wilkins, a friend from wartime service. Bowers had been designing loudspeakers in the workshop behind the counter. Her bequest took him out of retail and into loudspeakers full time, and the new company carried both men's names.

Sixty years later, the B&W 800 Series is what that workshop grew into. Its fifth Diamond generation, the 800 Series Diamond D5, was revealed at High End Vienna on 4 June 2026 and went on sale on 9 September 2026, from $15,000 a pair for the 805 D5 to $65,000 for the 801 D5. From across a room it looks like the D4 it replaces. Inside, the bracing, motors, crossovers, plinths and top plates have all been reworked, and the flagship's price has risen 86% since the D4's launch. For most D4 owners the better upgrade is still the room and the amplifier, and three lessons The Sound Lab's host, KD, learned from his own 800 Series Diamond D4 floorstanders explain why.

Worthing, 1966 to 1979: the brief behind the 801

The company's first decade produced the P1 of 1967, its first product, and the DM6 of 1976, whose Kevlar midrange cone stayed in B&W ranges for decades. The flagship began differently: as an order to ignore the rules. Hi-Fi News records that Bowers told his engineers to throw away the rulebook and build the best speaker they could, without restrictions. The owner's manual of the result, the 801 of 1979, called it "the first commercial effort to develop and produce a loudspeaker that would reflect the highest standards attainable without regard to any of the so called 'practical considerations'".

The 801 housed woofer, midrange and tweeter in separate enclosures, and it looked so radical that B&W offered an optional foam hood for owners who thought it too much. Forty-seven years on, the separate enclosures survive on the 801 D5.

John Bowers died in 1987, but the flagship is still built in Worthing. On 30 September 2026, for the 60th anniversary, B&W opened the factory and its research centre to journalists and played D4 against D5, the French site AVcesar reported that day.

The 800 Series lineage: Abbey Road's 801 to five Diamond generations

In 1980 John Bowers took the first 801 to Abbey Road Studios to show what it could do. By B&W's own account, the studio's engineers soon adopted it as their monitor of choice, and Abbey Road became the first recording studio in the world to use the 801 full-time. In 2025 B&W marked the partnership with the 801 Abbey Road Limited Edition, in Vintage Walnut with red Connolly leather, the edition that inspired the D5's new Dark Walnut finish.

Four ideas from the decades after that first 801 still shape the D5:

• Matrix bracing, Laurence Dickie's late-1980s lattice that cut cabinet colouration. The D5's new Space Frame bolts to it.
• The tapering-tube tweeter housing of the 1993 Nautilus, which defined the Nautilus 800 Series of 1998.
• The diamond dome tweeter, grown by chemical vapour deposition: fitted in 2005, refined for a new generation in 2010.
• The 2015 800 D3 rebuild: curved "reverse wrap" cabinets and the aluminium Turbine Head, Continuum midrange cone and Aerofoil bass cones that the D5 keeps.

The 800 D4 of 2021 restored the 801 name to the flagship, and the D4 Signature models of 2023 supplied the basis for the D5's motors, crossover parts and tweeter mesh.

Slide across for readable labelsStartEnd

Read every label as live text

• 1966
• Company founded in Worthing
• 1979
• Original 801
• 1980
• First 801 demonstrated at Abbey Road
• Late 1980s
• Matrix bracing
• 1998
• Nautilus 800 Series
• 2005
• First diamond dome tweeter
• 2010
• Refined Diamond generation
• 2015
• 800 D3
• 2021
• 800 D4
• 2023
• D4 Signature
• 2025
• Harman completes Sound United purchase
• 2026
• 800 Series Diamond D5

D5 vs D4: what changed inside the B&W 800 Series

Ketan Bharadia of What Hi-Fi?, who heard every D5 against its D4 at B&W's Southwater research centre (report published 7 July 2026), put it plainly: "At first glance, there doesn't seem to be too much to separate the two generations." The visible work was done in 2021. Hi-Fi News's review of the 801 D4 that December describes a top plate turned from wood into structural aluminium, a Matrix stiffened with aluminium and steel, and a midrange that swapped its conventional spider for a skeletal "Biomimetic" suspension.

The D5 goes after what is left to quieten, and B&W's announcement reads like an inventory of things you will never see: Space Frame Bracing bolted to the rear of the Matrix, a re-ribbed top plate, damped plinths, a crossover plate tied into the bracing, lower-distortion motors and crossover parts derived from the Signature models, and the 801 D4 Signature's tweeter mesh, which B&W says is more acoustically transparent.

The one layout change the announcement lists belongs to the 804 D5, which now hides an internal aluminium enclosure for its Continuum midrange, derived from the Turbine Head. What Hi-Fi? credits it with giving the 804 "a major uplift".

What did not change is as telling: by SpeakerDecision's count, six of the seven D5 models publish the same frequency response and sensitivity as before. The D5 is a generation of quieter boxes and cleaner motors, not new cone and dome materials.

Sources: Hi-Fi News (December 2021); B&W via The Ear (June 2026).

D5 prices: $15,000 to $65,000 a pair

US prices as of October 2026 are per pair, except the centre speakers, which are sold singly.

Sources: B&W via The Ear (June 2026); TechRadar (August 2021); SpeakerDecision (16 September 2026).

The 801 D5 costs 86% more than the 801 D4 did at launch and about 41% more than the D4's last US list. Against that late list, the steepest rise belongs to the 804, up 56%. The 801 D5 sits $15,000 above the $50,000 a pair that Stereophile listed for the 801 D4 Signature in February 2024.

The D4 column tells its own story: the 801 D4 had already climbed from $35,000 to about $46,000 during its five years on sale. Owners noticed. On AVForums one member called the D5 another hefty increase on top of the hefty increases the D4 took soon after its launch; on the Audioholics forum, one member compared the 801 D5's price to that of a new car.

Early D5 reviews: what has been published so far

As of early October 2026, the D5's published record is short: show reports from Vienna, a manufacturer-hosted comparison and one long-term review.

Show reports from Vienna, TechRadar's among them, were warm. The more useful document is What Hi-Fi?'s session at Southwater, candid about its limits: around two hours, ten pairs, three songs, B&W's own room and reference system (MSB DAC, Gryphon amplification), and a request to "take the following as our first impressions". From the 805 D4 to the 805 D5, Bharadia heard "no notable change in character or tonal balance", yet a speaker that "just sounds cleaner, clearer and more precise", one on which "any shortcomings in the source material are more apparent". He rated the 804 D5 above the previous-generation 803, heard "no hint of hardening or dynamic compression" from the 801 D5 at high volume, and found the range rhythmically "surefooted", though he was not sure it would pull listeners out of their seats with dance music. His early verdict: the D5 is "an appreciable step ahead" of the D4.

The long-term review is John Darko's, published by Darko.Audio in September 2026 after two months with the 804 D5 in his own room, against the Vivid Audio Kaya 45 and the T+A Talis S 330. The speaker, he writes, "surprised me in three different ways". Of the three, it is the one whose build "looks and feels the most like luxury furniture". His August first-thoughts piece had already flagged the caveat: an 8-ohm speaker with a 3-ohm dip wants an amplifier that works comfortably below 4 ohms, and he suspected that the little tubes in his Musical Fidelity NuVista 800.2 amplifier "may well be doing some top-end smoothing on Bowers' behalf".

Until a D5 is measured, the D4 numbers are the best guide to what this family asks of a system. Hi-Fi News measured the 801 D4 at 89.7 dB sensitivity, with "fabulously low" distortion of about 0.05% through the midrange and bass reaching 19 Hz, but also a treble lift of about 4 dB between 6 and 10 kHz and "a fairly tough amplifier load". Stereophile's John Atkinson found the 801 D4 Signature's treble balance "on the bright side of neutral" and its impedance "one of the most current-hungry" he had encountered, with an effective load as low as 1.24 ohms at 72 Hz.

Opinion divides along the same line. One commenter on Audiophile Style, who heard the D3 and D4 side by side, found the D4 "too treble forward and piercing, for my ears", while Future Audiophile's 802 D4 review found its highs not "overly sibilant or bright". KD's own verdict sits nearer the first camp: in his Klipsch La Scala against Wilson Yvette film of 9 November 2025, he rates the La Scala's horns as "not as fatiguing as the diamond tweeters".

So the early consensus is more transparency, the same character and a flagship that stays composed when pushed. The argument is older than the D5: whether B&W transparency reads as truth or as glare depends on the room and the amplifier, which is where a D4 owner's lessons begin.

D4 owner lessons: amplification, room and volume

KD has described the arrival of his 800 Series Diamond D4 floorstanders in two ways, and the two blame different culprits. Both are right. A third lesson came later.

Amplification: detailed, and hollow

By KD's own account, the D4s replaced his Klipsch Reference Premiere on a flagship Yamaha AV receiver. They sounded more detailed than the Klipsch and, on every song, hollow, even after he reconnected the Klipsch to check. He rang his dealer, by his own admission yelling, convinced the speakers were defective; the dealer recalled his earlier warning that the electronics were not a match, and offered to take them back. KD then called B&W's distributor and headquarters, where the question came back to him: why had he been sold these speakers without being told about the limits of his amplification? He ordered a McIntosh MA9500 integrated amplifier for same-day delivery.

On air, in that La Scala against Yvette film, he put the lesson in two lines: B&W's Diamonds are "hardcore audiophile speakers" that "require competent amplification and very carefully executed system matching to perform". The measurements above say the same thing in ohms.

Room: harsh, and the dealer blamed

The second telling comes from KD's film on room acoustics, published on 13 October 2025. At home the speakers were "too harsh", the soundstage was gone and details he had heard through the Klipsch were missing, and his first thought was that the dealer had cheated him. The dealer's first answer was more gear. The real answer took longer, and by KD's own account about $10,000 more, before he started reading about acoustics:

"They're more revealing speakers that will make the problems sound even bigger." KD, 13 October 2025

The first fix cost nothing. On the B&Ws he experimented with toe-in, toe-out and the distances from the back and side walls, and he puts a price on the result: a properly positioned speaker is the difference between a $5,000 pair and a $15,000 pair. Treatment came next, and, as he says in the same film, it stayed through every upgrade that followed. His proof is a test with his McIntosh MEN220 room correction: without his acoustic panels it had to correct 25%; with the panels back on the walls, 7%. The rule he took from the D4s is short: better speakers, bigger room problems.

Volume: "Bad Guy" above 95 dB

With McIntosh power behind them, the D4s showed a third limit. In the La Scala against Yvette film, KD says that on deep, detailed bass such as Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy", the speakers could be pushed past their limits above about 95 dB SPL: "They would clip. It had to be loud, but once you hear it, you cannot unhear it." That sent him hunting for a better match for his McIntosh electronics. In his audition, Wilson Audio Yvettes reproduced the same bass "perfectly", and he bought them. That clip, as he says, is the one you always remember.

Two of the three lessons carry straight over to the D5. The cabinets and motors are new; the low impedance dips are not, with the 802 D5 listing a 3.3-ohm minimum and the 804 D5 a 3-ohm dip. What Hi-Fi?'s warning about the 805 D5, that source shortcomings are more apparent, points to a more revealing generation, which makes the room matter more, not less. The third lesson is open: What Hi-Fi? heard no hardening from the 801 D5 at high volume, but on 225-watt Gryphon monoblocks in B&W's own room.

Who owns Bowers & Wilkins now?

Harman International, a Samsung Electronics subsidiary, has owned Bowers & Wilkins since 23 September 2025, when it completed its purchase of Sound United from Masimo. That makes Harman B&W's fourth owner since 2016. Joe Atkins, in control since 1996, sold B&W to Silicon Valley's EVA Automation in May 2016; Sound United bought it in October 2020; Masimo bought Sound United in early 2022 and announced its sale to Harman, for $350 million, in May 2025.

The D5 is the first 800 Series generation launched under Harman; the D4 arrived under Sound United. One Audioholics member asked what Harman was doing with the prices. The launch announcement lists parts, not reasons.

Should you upgrade from the 800 D4?

For most 800 D4 owners, no: the same money spent on the room and the amplifier usually buys more. The exceptions are specific.

• 804 D4 owners have the strongest case: the 804 D5 gets the one new internal enclosure on B&W's list, which What Hi-Fi? credits with "a major uplift". It also carries the steepest price rise.
• 805 D4 owners get a clear step: What Hi-Fi? heard more transparency, dynamics and space from the 805 D5, and could not name a downside.
• 801, 802 and 803 D4 owners are buying refinement: quieter cabinets, cleaner motors, the same character.
• D4 Signature owners already have much of what the D5 inherits; their case is the weakest.
• New buyers: in September 2026 the 801 D4 and 802 D4 were still listed in stock, at about $46,000 and $34,000 a pair.

Before any of it, take the D4 lessons cheapest first: position the speakers, which costs nothing; spend no more than $500, KD's suggested first step, on first-reflection treatment; check that the amplifier can deliver current into a low load; and decide how loud you really listen. Then ask the question KD put at the end of his Yvette film: "Do I have the foundation? System, room, electronics?" If the answer is yes, the D5 will show it. If not, the D5 will show that too.

Sixty years after Miss Knight's £10,000 bought John Bowers out of retail, the upgrade that pays back most for a D4 owner still starts with the room the speakers stand in. Speakers come and go. Room treatment, as KD puts it, "doesn't depreciate over time".

Frequently asked questions

What changed between the B&W 801 D4 and the 801 D5?

The cone and dome materials carry over; the bracing, top plate, plinth, motors, crossover parts and tweeter mesh are new. The 801 D5 is $65,000 a pair, against about $46,000 for the 801 D4 in September 2026.

How much does the B&W 800 Series D5 cost?

As of October 2026, US prices run from $15,000 a pair for the 805 D5 to $65,000 for the 801 D5.

Do B&W 800 Series speakers need a powerful amplifier?

They need an amplifier that can deliver current into a low load. Stereophile measured an effective load as low as 1.24 ohms on the 801 D4 Signature.