One thought on “B&W Nautilus 804 Nautilus Speakers”
I’ve had the B&W Nautilus 804s in my listening room for long enough now that my wife has stopped asking when the “yellow-eyed robots” are leaving, which I take as a form of critical acclaim. They stare at you. There’s no getting around it. That exposed Kevlar midrange cone, the color of a highlighter that’s seen things, sitting under a tweeter mounted in a cast aluminum pod that looks like a snail decided to go into aerospace. You don’t so much position these speakers as introduce them to the room and hope everyone gets along.
And then you play something, and the staring stops mattering.
What hit me first — before soundstage, before bass, before any of the vocabulary we all lean on — was the absence of the tweeter. Not literally; the thing is right there on top, unhoused, tapered tube trailing behind it like a tail. But B&W’s whole argument with the Nautilus tube is that the rear wave of the dome goes somewhere and dies quietly instead of coming back through the diaphragm to argue with the music. I can’t measure that in my room. I can tell you that cymbals on these speakers have weight and decay instead of that hashy silver sizzle that makes you reach for the volume knob at minute forty. There’s air up there, though I’ll admit the very last half-octave of shimmer is politely understated rather than thrown at you. I consider that a fair trade. My ears are not getting younger and neither is anyone else’s.
The midrange is the real event. That surround-less FST driver — a Kevlar cone with a foam ring instead of a conventional rubber surround — does something I’ve heard from very few dynamic speakers at any price: it gets out of the way. Female vocals arrive with the chest and throat intact, neither hollowed out nor thickened into that “warm” mush people mistake for musicality. A well-recorded piano sounds like a large wooden object with strings under tension, which is what it is. On dense orchestral material I could follow the second violins as a section rather than as a smear, and when a singer moved a few inches off-mic, I heard it and believed it.
Imaging is specific rather than expansive. These aren’t panels; you don’t get the enormous shimmering curtain of sound that makes you forget where the speakers are and start wondering where the room went. What you get instead is precision — a vocalist occupying a defined space with defined edges, instruments placed with the confidence of someone who has actually been to the recording session. Depth is genuinely good, front-to-back layering better than I expected from a cabinet this narrow. Once I got them about three feet off the front wall and toed in just past my shoulders, the center image locked in and stopped moving, and I stopped fiddling. That’s the sign.
Now the part where I earn my keep, because I like these speakers too much to sell you a fantasy.
These are speakers for a small-to-medium room. Two 6.5-inch bass drivers and a cabinet this size can only move so much air, and while the low end goes deeper and hits harder than the footprint suggests — there’s real articulation down there, tuneful and fast rather than the one-note thud so many towers deliver — push them hard in a big space and the drivers start to compress. It isn’t ugly. It doesn’t shred or fart or fall apart. It just… flattens. The dynamic peaks stop growing while the volume knob keeps turning, and the whole presentation shrinks a half-size like a sweater that’s been through the wrong cycle. In a 12×18 room with a normal ceiling, I never once found the ceiling. In a friend’s cathedral-ceilinged great room, I found it in about 2 minutes.
Which brings me to power, and I’m going to be unfashionably blunt about it: feed them. The 8-ohm nominal rating is a polite fiction that hides a dip toward 3 ohms right where the music lives, and the 804 does not respond to a modest amplifier by sounding modest — it responds by sounding thin and slightly anxious. I ran them briefly on a well-regarded 60-watt integrated and got a nice, tidy, slightly anemic version of these speakers. Swapping in an amp delivering a genuine 200 watts RMS into 8 ohms, with the current to double down into 4, was not a subtle upgrade. It was a different loudspeaker. Bass gained a floor. The midrange filled out and got its shoulders back. Dynamic swings that had been merely present became physical. My honest advice:
Target 200 watts RMS into 8 ohms. Not because you’ll play them loud, but because headroom is what makes them sound full-bodied at any level.
Prioritize current delivery over the number on the faceplate. An amp that doubles into 4 ohms will beat a bigger one that shrugs.
Don’t skimp upstream. The 804 is a precision instrument and it will happily tell your dinner guests that your streamer is mediocre.
One genuinely thoughtful bit of engineering deserves a paragraph: the port fires forward, dimpled like a golf ball to keep the airflow from turning turbulent and chuffing at you. This matters more than spec sheets admit. Rear-ported towers force you to negotiate a treaty with your back wall — pull them out, lose your living room; push them in, gain a boom you’ll spend a year trying to plug with foam. The 804 lets you get closer to the wall without the bass turning into a bass drum in a stairwell. For anyone whose listening room is also a room where people live, that’s not a footnote. That’s the difference between owning these and admiring them at a dealer.
FINAL VERDICT
The Nautilus 804 is not a speaker that tries to overwhelm you, and if you’re shopping for wall-shaking scale in a barn of a room, keep walking — the drivers will compress and you’ll never hear what these are actually about. Put them in a sensibly sized room, hang 200 watts of well-behaved amplification off them, take advantage of that front port to place them where they actually sound right, and they deliver a midrange purity, a treble refinement, and an imaging precision that a lot of far newer and far more expensive speakers still haven’t matched. They ask for a real amplifier and a room that suits them. Meet those two conditions and they’re a bargain bordering on the absurd. Highly recommended — with the fine print read aloud.
I’ve had the B&W Nautilus 804s in my listening room for long enough now that my wife has stopped asking when the “yellow-eyed robots” are leaving, which I take as a form of critical acclaim. They stare at you. There’s no getting around it. That exposed Kevlar midrange cone, the color of a highlighter that’s seen things, sitting under a tweeter mounted in a cast aluminum pod that looks like a snail decided to go into aerospace. You don’t so much position these speakers as introduce them to the room and hope everyone gets along.
And then you play something, and the staring stops mattering.
What hit me first — before soundstage, before bass, before any of the vocabulary we all lean on — was the absence of the tweeter. Not literally; the thing is right there on top, unhoused, tapered tube trailing behind it like a tail. But B&W’s whole argument with the Nautilus tube is that the rear wave of the dome goes somewhere and dies quietly instead of coming back through the diaphragm to argue with the music. I can’t measure that in my room. I can tell you that cymbals on these speakers have weight and decay instead of that hashy silver sizzle that makes you reach for the volume knob at minute forty. There’s air up there, though I’ll admit the very last half-octave of shimmer is politely understated rather than thrown at you. I consider that a fair trade. My ears are not getting younger and neither is anyone else’s.
The midrange is the real event. That surround-less FST driver — a Kevlar cone with a foam ring instead of a conventional rubber surround — does something I’ve heard from very few dynamic speakers at any price: it gets out of the way. Female vocals arrive with the chest and throat intact, neither hollowed out nor thickened into that “warm” mush people mistake for musicality. A well-recorded piano sounds like a large wooden object with strings under tension, which is what it is. On dense orchestral material I could follow the second violins as a section rather than as a smear, and when a singer moved a few inches off-mic, I heard it and believed it.
Imaging is specific rather than expansive. These aren’t panels; you don’t get the enormous shimmering curtain of sound that makes you forget where the speakers are and start wondering where the room went. What you get instead is precision — a vocalist occupying a defined space with defined edges, instruments placed with the confidence of someone who has actually been to the recording session. Depth is genuinely good, front-to-back layering better than I expected from a cabinet this narrow. Once I got them about three feet off the front wall and toed in just past my shoulders, the center image locked in and stopped moving, and I stopped fiddling. That’s the sign.
Now the part where I earn my keep, because I like these speakers too much to sell you a fantasy.
These are speakers for a small-to-medium room. Two 6.5-inch bass drivers and a cabinet this size can only move so much air, and while the low end goes deeper and hits harder than the footprint suggests — there’s real articulation down there, tuneful and fast rather than the one-note thud so many towers deliver — push them hard in a big space and the drivers start to compress. It isn’t ugly. It doesn’t shred or fart or fall apart. It just… flattens. The dynamic peaks stop growing while the volume knob keeps turning, and the whole presentation shrinks a half-size like a sweater that’s been through the wrong cycle. In a 12×18 room with a normal ceiling, I never once found the ceiling. In a friend’s cathedral-ceilinged great room, I found it in about 2 minutes.
Which brings me to power, and I’m going to be unfashionably blunt about it: feed them. The 8-ohm nominal rating is a polite fiction that hides a dip toward 3 ohms right where the music lives, and the 804 does not respond to a modest amplifier by sounding modest — it responds by sounding thin and slightly anxious. I ran them briefly on a well-regarded 60-watt integrated and got a nice, tidy, slightly anemic version of these speakers. Swapping in an amp delivering a genuine 200 watts RMS into 8 ohms, with the current to double down into 4, was not a subtle upgrade. It was a different loudspeaker. Bass gained a floor. The midrange filled out and got its shoulders back. Dynamic swings that had been merely present became physical. My honest advice:
One genuinely thoughtful bit of engineering deserves a paragraph: the port fires forward, dimpled like a golf ball to keep the airflow from turning turbulent and chuffing at you. This matters more than spec sheets admit. Rear-ported towers force you to negotiate a treaty with your back wall — pull them out, lose your living room; push them in, gain a boom you’ll spend a year trying to plug with foam. The 804 lets you get closer to the wall without the bass turning into a bass drum in a stairwell. For anyone whose listening room is also a room where people live, that’s not a footnote. That’s the difference between owning these and admiring them at a dealer.
FINAL VERDICT
The Nautilus 804 is not a speaker that tries to overwhelm you, and if you’re shopping for wall-shaking scale in a barn of a room, keep walking — the drivers will compress and you’ll never hear what these are actually about. Put them in a sensibly sized room, hang 200 watts of well-behaved amplification off them, take advantage of that front port to place them where they actually sound right, and they deliver a midrange purity, a treble refinement, and an imaging precision that a lot of far newer and far more expensive speakers still haven’t matched. They ask for a real amplifier and a room that suits them. Meet those two conditions and they’re a bargain bordering on the absurd. Highly recommended — with the fine print read aloud.