CES 2014

I can’t believe it was five years ago that I first heard the Wilson Sasha W/P speaker at a CES. Funnily enough, it was in the same suite at the Mirage so when I first entered this year I didn’t notice anything new. But then I realized that the speaker on the right in my photo was the same size as the Sasha—okay, it’s ½” taller than the original Sasha, shown on the left—but now resembles the larger Alexia that I reviewed in December, though the tweeter is now mounted in the same enclosure as the midrange unit. The Mk.2 Sasha costs $29,900/pair compared with the Mk.1's $27,900/pair.

The old Sasha used a titanium-dome tweeter; the new speaker’s soft-dome tweeter resembles that used in the Alexandria XLF and Alexia but is, in fact, somewhat different. And other than the styling, most of the improvements between the old and new Sashas lie under the skin. The top unit’s baffle is now machined from X Material, the stiff, Massy mineral-loaded phenolic composite used by Wilson for critical panels, and the vibrational behavior of the Sasha’s enclosures has been optimized using the Brüel & Kjaer laser vibrometer that the Utah-based company purchased during the development of the XLF and Alexia.

There is one other external difference: Below I compare the back panel of the new Sasha (top) with that of the old Sasha (bottom). You can see that the new speaker offers much more flexibility of the angling and position of the HF/MF module compared with the older speaker—27 positions compared with four.