Hi, I'm a newbie to this site. Am the happy owner of a vintage (2005) pair of B&W 802Ds. I like the sound driven through highly upgraded HOLFI PRE 1,5,1 and NB250 (By Peter Holstein) battery-driven amps. However, the speaker set needs new life - and even though I like the analytic part of the music stage the Midrange and tweeter do not quite work for me these days. It's too much 'in your face' sound. Am in the process of upgrading the core crossover components to much better quality (Jantzen Caps etc) that and a possible rewiring internally and adding impedance checking components will def. be an improvement. Also soldering the wire to the driver connections will add to the quality, changing the binding posts to WBT and Tube connectors (using the Bi-wiring double set) will work. However, I do believe that redesigning the whole crossover would be the ultimate challenge. Believe there was one post on this forum where that was done taking hours of work - if anyone has any experience with a new design of the crossover I would be interested to learn from that - By default, I'll go the changing to better components (Caps and coils in particular)..
The characteristic sound of your speaker follows from the uneven radiation pattern of the tweeter and midrange. I believe this is compensated for to some extent in the crossover which creates a non-flat on-axis response. Unless you are on top of this kind of thing I would suggest you should expect your crossover mods to result in at best no change but more likely a reduced sound quality. This may be fine if you are happy to experiment but the apparent assumption that expensive boutique components will result in improved performance is unlikely to be true for well engineered speakers. The design objectives of your speaker may be a bit odd but it is well engineered.
