http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/69687-does-wilson-audio-know-what-they-aredoing.html
http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/920/index6.html
Their speakers have worse measured performance than my Vandersteen 2Ce towers that have a suggested retail of $1200. The Wilson speakers look kinda cool, just not $20,000+ cool. Huge waste of money.
Now let's see how many flies I can catch.
Seth, I think you may be right in this one. These are the only
Wilson speakers I have auditioned, about 9 months ago with my friend Phil.
These were originally 50K, at a high end dealer in Minneapolis. I gather they had over stayed their welcome, and the dealer was ready to sacrifice for $31K!
The speakers are huge and weigh a ton. The dealer put on some folk music with solo guitar and female vocalist. Right away I thought there was excessive presence in the vocalist's voice, but it was not unpleasant and well focused.
Now these speakers were being fed by huge Mac mono blocks from a high end CD player direct.
So I got out my discs. The first audition was of the AHO symphony No.12, with the loud rhythmic drumming in the first movement. I just could not kick those speakers to produce any visceral impact at all. No crack to the drums, it was a real disappointment for speakers that big. Adding a massive Wilson sub only helped marginally. A totally different experience from my rig and also the B & W 800 ds of Phil's.
Then we listened to some orchestral music. The whole sound stage was muddled, everything in confusion and flutes in particular popping out and bringing far too much attention to themselves. Brass was rough and string sound not the best. Again it was impossible to work up a decent spl. without the speakers sounding very stressed. I had the impression there was a significant mid range problem.
I said to Phil lets go for the jugular, and brought out the CDs, of British boys choirs in cathedral spaces. The result can only be described as awful and unpleasant. There was no smoothness to trebles and the echo of their voices dominated the whole sound stage in a most unpleasant fashion. There was no sense of space at all.
I said to Phil these speakers have a nasty peak around 1.5 kHz.
That concluded our unhappy experience with those monsters. The sales man said we were using the wrong music for evaluation!
Now I was not expecting to run into these speakers and so new of no measurements. However on digging them up lo and behold the 1.5 kHz peak.
If you look at the waterfall plot you can see a boat load of problems in the speech discrimination band. They sound like they measure, and its not pleasant Seth.
A speaker with that kind of response in the critical speech discrimination band is not worth much.
