A brutal review of the Wilson Maxx

Audiokinesis,
You state that as an amature speaker designer you were unable to make a 1st order crossover speaker sound good. That doesn't suprise me. The pro designers however, do them just fine. Think GMA, Audio Machina, Harmonic Precision, Zu, Gallo etc

For the record - I'm not taking potshots at Samuel. He seems like a very nice, intelligent, and reasonable person and an asset to this discussion. I tend to play the devil's advocate on Audiogon when no one else is doing it and I was just pointing out that he comes from a particular point of view which clearly has interests on one side of the fence, so to speak. Nor am I implying that ANY manufacturer/marketer of audio equipment is involved in what some people keep calling "conspiracy". That's not a word I've ever used here. Advertising and promotion is what equipment makers and suppliers are SUPPPOSED to do, and what consumers EXPECT them do to. If someone (e.g. Stereophile) is willing to help them even further because they advertise, then by all means, why shouldn't they take the help in the form of a review or any other way.

It's the MEDIA that, IMO, isn't doing things quite the way that consumers should expect of them. It's possible that the structure of the whole business/marketing "foodchain" is so "normal" to the media people that they're in denial as to why they're really there, who is paying them to be there, and that they do have unwritten, ingrained rules that they must follow to keep that pay coming in.
But enough on that - I'm just saying that my skepticism has nothing at all to do with the "production" side of the industry, and that Samuel seems like a fine person to me - he just brought up a couple more points that I felt like running with (mostly because it was a slow day at work).

My biases tend to run parallel to RH's. That's probably why I don't subscribe. What's the point of hearing your own echo. That said, I 've enjoyed the dynamic capabilities of Watt/Puppies driven by Krells playing big band jazz immensely. Manufacturers have criticized the power reviewers have in this industry for some time now. Now we have reviewers reviewing each other. Hmmn, interesting. I think I like it.

Hi Songwriter72,

As an amateur I did build other true first-order crossover two-way speakers that sounded pretty good (though power handling was compromised), but those did not measure "flat" on-axis.

I use a combination of mechanical and electrical roll-off to get a first order transition between some of the drivers in my one commercial offering, though the region of overlap isn't broad enough for me to call it a "true first order" crossover. And I pay more attention to the power response than to the on-axis response.

Duke

Well. I got no beef in this. I was at CES last Year and will likely be this year and so I get to hear room after room of high end stuff with a wide variation in price.

I do think that reviewers speaker reviews can be and in fact are biased by advertising dollars. This doesn't mean folks lie; it does mean that negatives are couched and underemphasized and positives overly glorified. I saw this even with my own speaker line that I personally own ( and paid for). In addition, while we all like differently colored speakers ( or types of sounds so to speak) I'd like to see some objective comparisons to a standard, such as response curves in anechoic chambers. I think its a good piece of data among others.

The writer of the article critical of the Wilson's really did come across as quite hostile to me as a true non-partisan in this one; but he did raise good points as well.