I haven't listened to the Nautilus but I have listened to the B&W 800 (RRP £23500) speakers and they really have to be experienced to be belived. I was listening in a studio environment that had just installed them, as an upgrade from the already very nice Quested setup they had. When we switched to the 800's the effect was profound. The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless soundstage where noises just happened within it, rather than relative to the L/R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It was incredible.
I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music. These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever worth anything" bucket list.
You can DIY high-end speakers, saving thousands. Sounds weird, but its true. Here is one example that is popular, there are others: http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=3212
I'm going to make a vast oversimplification here, but a rule of thumb is that a lot of the well-regarded DIY kits on the market compare well with retail speakers that cost 2-3X as much. Some examples:
What kind of bugs me is that there really aren't any kits and very few DIY designs that match the kind of speakers I really miss, at least not ones focused on home audio.
Those speakers being the old-school big boxes with 12-15" woofers, sometimes multiple and usually 3-way designs, sometimes 4-way. Large, heavy, imposing and punchy, big speakers for big music. I know modern speaker drivers have come a long way, but you just can't get that from 6" or 8" drivers in the same way.
DIY PA speaker designs do provide some of this, but I'll have to tweak the aesthetics more in a "living room-friendly" direction, because nobody seems to want big beefy speakers anymore.
There's a series of PA cab designs called fEarFul, that incorporate the newer 12" and 15" woofers from Eminence. You might have to dig around to locate the actual design data, but I do know that the designs were carefully tweaked and are stoopid loud.
In my own case, I worked out what SPL I actually need for my listening tastes, and chose a suitable woofer by keeping an eye on the close-outs at Parts Express. The drawback is that my designs are irreproducible because the parts are sold out. But they're also not worth publishing. The benefit is that the prices are often pretty compelling.
Lower specs also reduce the requirements for the tweeter and any other components such as crossover.
The JBELL SS15 tapped horn is another great design. Using the 55€ 15LB075-UW4 chassis, this is probably the best bang-for-buck subwoofer you can build right now. Not as easy to build as a BR though. Report with detailed measurements:
Interesting, I had the impression the DIY scene is not considering the WAF as much as the mainstream market. But I agree on kits, if you don't have a workshop its hard to built most designs. Don Highend has designed a few larger ones too, eg http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=5291
If my dad was still alive, that would have been a perfect project for us to jump into and spend countless weekends working on. For now I'll have to wait until I have my own workshop to build a set of beasts like that.
I demo'd the 800 D3 at a hifi shop and was very impressed. What impressed me most was that it sounded utterly effortless like they were utterly effortless. They were powered by a pair of 1KW monoblocks and every peak in the music was reproduced without a hint of strain even at concert levels.
I will say that there was a lot of treble. Stereophile's measurements (which I did not see until after the demo, so please don't think they colored my impressions!) show some big 5dB humps in the upper treble which I would say correlates to what I was hearing. https://www.stereophile.com/content/bampw-800-diamond-loudsp...
I think this boosted treble is generally a part of B&W's secret sauce across their product range. I really believe their speakers are tailored for middle-aged and elderly guys with some degree of high frequency hearing loss. Makes sense; those are the guys with enough cash to blow on speakers like these.
I am one of those guys (well, the hearing part... not the cash part) but I prefer maybe 2-3dB of boosted treble and not a full-on tweeter assault. =)
The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless soundstage where noises just happened within it, rather than relative to the L/R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It was incredible.
This make me curious about this whole situation: speaker change equals physical location change, would that have played a part in it? Because what you describe here is exactly what (at least for me) is the effect of proper speaker placement vs suboptimal placement. I.e. this 'you don't hear the speakers anymore, instead it sounds like you're sitting in the sound' effect. Which definitely isn't there if placement is off, no matter how good speakers are. Then again, I'm not really an audio engineer so maybe you're talking about a different level of soundstage..
I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music. These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever worth anything" bucket list.