Wilson Audio Haters

@stevecham

I’m going to call  on a couple of your claims. Several milliseconds would be equivalent to several feet offset. Very hard for any crossover designer to do. Do you have a link to a particular measurement that shows this?

You may mean to say that they are not time co-incident. That is true, few speakers besides Thiel or Vandersteen or Dunlavy are or were. That loudspeaker design has not stopped and all become time co-incident is an indicator of the cost/value proposition and market acceptance. As a consumer and speaker builder, I’m not really interested in this feature, though I could make my own speakers like this. Certainly it is relatively straightforward to achieve this digitally. But even then, several milliseconds?

I’ve never seen any Wilson measure with poor phase matching either.

If I was going to criticize the crossovers and speakers it would b in the tonal balance, and treble smoothness.

Best,

Erik

Call me on it if you will, and many have and I’m not alone. That dog won’t hunt; distort the time domain and you distort timbre, pure and simple. This is why live music sounds the way it does, because it does NOT distort in the time domain. To knowingly subtract from that while prettying up the product to create over expensive esoterica is inexcusable if one cares about preserving MUSIC!

And you know something, it’s those few milliseconds time difference between our ears that allowed us to hear from which direction the saber toothed tiger approached that saved our asses!

http://www.stereophile.com/content/wilson-audio-sophia-series-3-loudspeaker-measurements#KQDcxc4eHJR...

Sasha: Fig.3 shows the Sophia's step response on its tweeter axis. The initial up/down spike is the tweeter output; the negative-going decay of the tweeter's step blends smoothly into the midrange unit's step response, the positive-going decay of which blends smoothly into the start of the woofer's step response. (The tweeter and woofer are connected in positive acoustic polarity, the midrange unit in inverted polarity.) But if you look very closely at this graph, there is a slight depression just before the tweeter's step. This is the start of the midrange unit's negative-going step, which suggests that the Sophia's optimal axis—ie, where the outputs of the three drive-units optimally sum in the frequency domain—is actually just above the tweeter axis.
Read more at http://www.stereophile.com/content/wilson-audio-sophia-series-3-loudspeaker-measurements#5XggM8TqXbY...

Alexia: This graph reveals that, as in the Alexandria XLF, the tweeter is connected in positive acoustic polarity, the midrange driver in negative polarity. However, with the tweeter module set up by Peter McGrath, the graph also shows that the negative-going decay of the tweeter's step smoothly blends with the negative-going start of the midrange unit's step, confirming the excellent frequency-domain integration of their outputs seen in fig.4. Moving slightly above or below the intended axis destroys that smooth blending of step responses.
Read more at http://www.stereophile.com/content/wilson-audio-specialties-alexia-loudspeaker-measurements#YE4CzkkR...

Frequency domain isn't TIME DOMAIN.

@soundsrealaudio                                                                                                                                                                                                             It is a lot easier than that. Just sell your 2D audio set and go on a nice trip with your partner.

<< sigh >> So it’s a little over 1 millisecond. That’s absolutely typical behavior for a 3 way system. If your claim is that it’s impossible to make realistic speakers without being time co-incident, then I’m afraid there are thousands of examples that say otherwise, and very little proof that it is subjectively superior. It’s fine if you like it, or feel you must have it but kind of a ridiculous claim to make that this should have the universal appeal that it has to you, or that we should all bow down to your pet spec.

Like it or not, the single most important and perceptible difference between speakers is frequency domain. I’m not saying it’s the only one, but it is big for everyone. In that dimension a lot of the top speakers have really terrible, but oddly similar, responses. Current media has tried to train the audophile into believing these ragged sounding speakers are the cream of the crop, and Wilson seems to be going along with them.

Having said that, here is the Monitor Audio Platinum. Look at how much smoother it's time domain performance is. By better I mean smoother, not narrower.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/monitor-audio-platinum-pl300-ii-loudspeaker-measurements#bRxtFG4H...

Their tweet sucks above 10kHz though, severe let down for otherwise superbly designed speaker.