Years ago we had a tv commercial in my country about a couple that won the lottery. You see them driving their newly purchased Lamborghini Countach in a typical suburb. The authorities have strategically placed ’bumps’ in the road in such areas to limit traffic speed. Next shot you see the happy couple stop their new supercar in front of one of these bumps (I’m sure there’s an official term for these things, but it escapes me). The iconic door swings open, after which the wife crawl out of the car with several grocery bags. This lifts the car just enough for the driver to ’take’ the bump. Then the wife gets in again and they drive on, most likely to repeat this procedure at the next bump. End of commercial.
I was reminded about this when I first heard one of those big Wilson speakers (the model before the Alexias, can’t remember their name). They were at a dealer demo room after a weekend show, with Peter McGrath playing some of his own recordings. It was loud and sort of impressive, even in a fully packed room. On Monday my friend who worked at the dealership allowed me a few hours alone with these things. I brought a stack of my own cd’s and we listener together. Most of these normal commercially available cd’s just sounded terrible, so both of us were very underwhelmed to say the least.
So we came to this conclusion: such extreme speakers are great for only the very best recordings, like an F1 car is made for the race track. But they’re totally unsuited for average recordings (the overwhelming majority), just like the Lamborghini was a painfully wrong choice for that suburban environment.
I’ve heard many of these extreme speakers (including Magico’s) over the years at shows and demo’s and always came back with that same feeling. If you are an audiophile with a wide musical taste who puts music before sound, such speakers are pretty useless.
