Wilson Audio Haters

i am amazed at how many posters have strong opinions about sound characteristics of driver materials etc. sometimes i wonder if you guys are for real with your amazing ears. dont get me going on those of you who have extreme dislikes and likes for certain metals in your wires and cords. my hat is off i guess. someday someone will set up  the perfect demo room with all the products and all of us experts will have to take blind tests and have our scores published online for all to see.

Cone material sometimes makes subtle it can make subtle yet very very sweet difference gold ears arent required to hear sweet natural timbre of percussion. I think vocals sound most realistic on speakers with paper cones also, that I have heard. among other strengths they have. all the top line speaker manufacturers their best lines are more often paper.

I like how bo thrashed on paper cones its old forgotten tech and how he eloquently puts people that favor natural material stupid in another speaker topic haha then in this topic hes praising it like that never happened.

My subs have paper cones, they are some of the most natural sounding Ive heard regardless sof cost. Again I dont think golden ears are required, nothing like that, you just have to listen. 

The only thing I have against Wilson Audio speakers is that 1) they use high order crossovers (not good for time alignment at the cross over points due to phase angle shift) and that 2) they invert the polarity of some drivers, by design or necessity, relative to others, to do the least amount of "damage" to timbre and phase. But to me the bandaid will never fix a fundamental design flaw. One can only hope to do the least damage to timbre in the time domain. Human ears are very sensitive to it, and I can hear it every time.

These two features combine to distort time and phase accuracy. If Wilson addressed these issues, perhaps I would give them another listen. Until they do, count me out as a fan of their products. The flashy paint jobs are excessive and unappealing to my eyes and ears.

And...$48,500 for Alexias that have the tweeter and midrange drivers out of phase in the several millisecond time domain? Cmon, really? I'll stick with my sub $10K Thiel CS6s thank you.

@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