yes we all know that anyone in this forum can make much better speakers than wilson audio does, but still, what is it that wilson audio speakers do so well that so many audiophiles love? and audiophiles and critics have loved wilson audio speakers for a long time now!
it seems absurd that wilson audio would be a bad speaker manufacturer but still have so many fans
https://www.stereophile.com/content/icing-munich-cake-mcgrath-fon-nagra-wilson-impex
it seems absurd that wilson audio would be a bad speaker manufacturer but still have so many fans
https://www.stereophile.com/content/icing-munich-cake-mcgrath-fon-nagra-wilson-impex
They spent decades steadily building a strong brand that could support high profit margins. They did this using conventional drivers in conventional boxes with effectively no engineering innovation, modest marketing innovation and modest technical performance for the price. As best I can judge their success has been built on providing what many rich nontechnical customers actually want from a pair of speakers rather than what might say they want, what a studio would want or what many of us here would want. Good luck to them.
Their speakers may be irrelevant to many of us here interested in high technical performance for reasonable prices but they are an excellent example of how to run a successful business in a crowded market sector which is almost trivially easy to enter while offering the potential for high margins if one can only get the marketing features right.
I witnessed a Dave Wilson demo back in the 90s at a hifi show. At the time I was really impressed and then realised a few years later there were mind games going on. back then the formula was
1. expensive equipment
2. treated room
3. limited numbers so you had to wait and couldn't leave during the demo to make it feel there was something special
4. carefully curated recordings (with name dropping of the mate who recorded them)
5. Before each recording it was explicitly explained to you what you would hear.
And step 5 definately worked...
Not listened to Wilson stuff without the brainwashing beforehand so cannot comment how good it really is.
1. expensive equipment
2. treated room
3. limited numbers so you had to wait and couldn't leave during the demo to make it feel there was something special
4. carefully curated recordings (with name dropping of the mate who recorded them)
5. Before each recording it was explicitly explained to you what you would hear.
And step 5 definately worked...
Not listened to Wilson stuff without the brainwashing beforehand so cannot comment how good it really is.
yes, many says wilson speakers looks like robots, is that part of the success, the complicated design?
which ad do you mean? for most part i see very little ads but lots of words spreading their x and y and what else materials, and cryptic names on technologies, and they almost always manage to be in the finest system in the finest room at shows
but are they really that irrelevant to diy folks, are their complex stuctures, materials and driver time alignments really nothing to learn from, is all this just a way to sell their speakers and has nothing to do with sound quality? for sure, measurements of wilson audio speakers do look differently to most other speakers, but wilson speakers are often very large and by that difficult to measure correctly
yes in some ways wilson audio seems to work a bit like linn salesmen did in the far past, they had their tricks to manipulate ones mind.
i am not sure, i really do think the reviewers in stereophile love wilson audio speakers when they say they do, and that they not only saying this because of the business model they have.
I know the ones i heared (Sasha, Puppy, Alexandria) sound bad, very ragged). I heared the Sasha next to a pair of Harbeth M30's and prefered the latter a lot more (and they are also not the most neutral speakers). I think it carefull created hype and the futuristic styling that attracts most customers, not the sound. Btw: The owner of the Alexandria's i heared (more than once, he is a friend) replaced them with JBL M2's on my advice and he could not be happier with the results...
I actually found the Alexx pretty good, sounded neutral to me. Obviously they played way too loud and music one would never know or listen to as already has been said so a disclaimer is due. I also heard a pair of sashas daws but they were awful. Measurements of Stereophile seem to confirm that too the Alexx has pretty neutral on-axis and the off axis in the listening room measurements seem to have a good downward slope so maybe this is one of the exceptions in the line-up? I also once saw a spinorama measuremant of the Sophia 2 in Floyd Toole's book I think which was surprisingly decent. A mixed bag for me, the new ones are definitely all bad, as measurements indicate, the old ones can be good but seem to have all kinds of dips and peaks in the response :/ so definitely not the best of the best.
If the objective is a high technical performance then the designs makes no sense in terms of engineering. The outside of the cabinet should smoothly guide the sound so that when drivers are summed they create the designed smoothly varying directivity at the listening position. The last thing wanted is large amounts of diffraction from large numbers of edges. Time delays and crossover slopes are accurately handled by DSP not complicated uneven cabinet shapes and analogue 6 dB slope steps.
The cabinets have nothing to do with engineering in any real sense. They are marketing features designed to impress the nontechnical particularly when compared to speakers that are well engineered. This is important because it will almost certainly add significant value for the type of person that is a Wilson customer. Similarly the in-your-face garishness looks significantly lowers the speakers value in my eyes but this is quite the opposite for their customers. Similarly for a range of other features. Knowing what their customers actually want and providing it is what Wilson does very well. Being dismissive because of the modest technical performance and non-engineering (if that is a word?) is completely missing point. They are good speakers because they get bought by significant numbers of people who are happy with them.
I noticed in the few magazine reviews I read of Wilson’s that there were no meaningful comparisons with other brands, only with other Wilson speakers. Since these magazines live from ad revenue and since a Wilson review will probably drive sales, I am inclined to suspect that Wilson was able to dictate the terms of the review.
As just said in the Munich thread, I found all Wilson’s I have ever heard fatiguing to various degrees. They also didn’t sound smooth, every pop and crackle from the record stood out, I felt at the time that their sound had a grating quality. I also wondered whether that was the high end sound of the past, dry with emphasised details.
I much preferred Magico as far as luxury high end speakers were concerned, at least they offer a package that almost nobody can diy. Detailed but liquid and so clear.
As just said in the Munich thread, I found all Wilson’s I have ever heard fatiguing to various degrees. They also didn’t sound smooth, every pop and crackle from the record stood out, I felt at the time that their sound had a grating quality. I also wondered whether that was the high end sound of the past, dry with emphasised details.
I much preferred Magico as far as luxury high end speakers were concerned, at least they offer a package that almost nobody can diy. Detailed but liquid and so clear.
I know three different people who bought various Wilson models (Sasha, Alexia and I forget the third model) and they all sold them because they couldn't tame unlistenably hot upper mids or lower treble. I had listened to the three models at one time or another, and while I might call them exciting sounding, they sounded too edgy for long term listening pleasure.
I demo’d one of my amps to a bunch of guys running a high end audio business out of s substaptoperty in Surrey. I’ve never seen so many high-end dpeskers in one place. The Magico’s were so bad the guy apologised and said they ‘hadn’t been run in fully yet’. I found them very hard and forward.
The purple prose on their website is atrocious. "...an unalloyed conduit to a numinous connection to music." and here we have "I'm fortunate to breath a heady and rarefied audio oxygen..."
All of it rather cringeworthy to read.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
All of it rather cringeworthy to read.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...