Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Having discontinued the MAXX3 loudspeaker ($68,000/pair in 2009, when I reviewed it), Wilson Audio needed to plug the resulting gaping hole between the Alexia ($48,500/pair) and the Alexandria XLF ($210,000/pair). Company founder Dave Wilson was busy with the limited-edition WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker ($685,000/pair), so son Darryl Wilson set about creating a speaker with a retail price of about $100,000/pair. The result, the Alexx, finally came in at $109,000/pair.

The Alexx shares with the Alexandria XLF Wilson's Aspherical Group Delay technology, whereby the positions of its individually enclosed midrange and treble drivers can be adjusted, precisely, to recreate a time-correct waveform at the listening position. The Alexx is thus easily recognizable as a Wilson Audio design. Incidentally, Darryl didn't design it alone: He managed a team that included Vern Credille, Wilson Audio's chief acoustical and electrical engineer, whom I met when I toured the Wilson factory in fall 2016 (footnote 1).

The Alexx looks like a smaller Alexandria XLF. Still, at 62.3" high by 15.75" wide by 26.75" deep; and weighing 452 lbs, this is a big, heavy speaker. And, like the Alexandria's, the Alexx's tall, rectangular, ported bass enclosure houses two woofers: an 10.5" and a 12.5", vs the bigger speaker's 13" and 15" cones. The smaller, upper woofer's radiation pattern at the top of its frequency range is claimed to produce a better blend with the lower limit of the lower and larger midrange driver's response (see below). The newly designed drivers with their cones of hard paper pulp replace the Alexandria's Focal-sourced "W"-material woofers. The new woofers were evolved from those developed for the Alexia, which in turn were originally designed for the WAMM.

Unlike the Alexandria's bass bin, the Alexx's is made from Wilson's X-Material, a proprietary, mineral-infused, phenolic-composite resin that's very stiff and difficult to machine. Its angled front baffle is claimed to produce better integration of the drivers' outputs in the time domain, and its sides gently taper toward the top, for a more graceful transition to the stack of tweeter and midrange housings above.

Unlike the Alexandra's midrange-tweeter-midrange (MTM) configuration, in which two 7" midrange drivers each cover the same range of frequencies, the Alexx's four-way design divides the midband between two drive-units, a 5.75" and a 7", each driver covering a different bandwidth.

While Wilson doesn't specify the Alexx's crossover frequencies, the 7" midrange driver—the same composite pulp/fiber cone used in the Alexandria—covers the lower midrange; the 5.75" paper/pulp cone, originally used as the midrange driver of the Sabrina, covers the upper midrange. This configuration preserves the dynamic benefits of the larger midrange driver, with its robust half-roll rubber surround, while slightly extending the upper-midrange response, which relieves the tweeter of some of its former upper-midrange duties. That tweeter is a 1" Convergent Synergy dome unit of doped silk, built by Scan-Speak to Wilson's specifications; Convergent Synergy variants are now used throughout Wilson's product line.

As in the Alexandria XLF, each of the three MTM drivers occupies its own enclosure: the 7" and 5.75" midranges respectively at bottom and top, and the 1" tweeter between them (the midrange enclosures are vented). Each enclosure can be slid forward or back, and/or tilted, relative to the woofer bin. The goal, as suggested earlier, is to position the drivers for precisely simultaneous arrival at the listening position of all frequencies, and to improve frequency-domain driver integration. Protruding from the base of each midrange enclosure are three spikes—two in front, one at the rear—that sit on an aluminum step; the angle, or rake, of the enclosure, can be adjusted with spikes of various lengths. The Alexx is the first Wilson speaker with two of these steps.

The fore-and-aft position of each upper enclosure is determined and secured by where in each of two dimpled tracks the enclosure's front spikes are placed. Its rake is set with a rear spike, after which it's locked rigidly in place with large-diameter bolts. The tweeter enclosure sits on its spikes atop the housing of the 7" midrange, occupying the space within that enclosure's L shape (as viewed from the side).

Vern Credille did the complex math that determined each baffle's fore-and-aft position and rake angle, based on the listener's distance from the speakers and the height of his or her ears when seated. In the manual, Wilson supplies charts of figures that eliminate guesswork and make possible foolproof installation by the dealer.

Otherwise, the Alexx is another example of Wilson Audio's meticulous build quality: robustly braced, nonresonant enclosures of Wilson's X-Material (S-Material is used for the front baffles of the midrange enclosures); overbuilt, potted crossover networks, the wiring looms of which comprise twisted pairs, each of a specific construction, length, and twist ratio (Transparent Audio manufactures all of the Alexx's internal wiring to Wilson's specifications); and even the grille frames, which are not injection molded but machined of X-Material.

The single pair of binding posts for connecting the entire Alexx to a power amplifier—three other pairs of binding posts, for the midrange and treble drivers, accept the spade lugs with which the crossover's wiring looms are terminated—are low on the bass bin's rear panel, but higher than on the Alexandria XLF, where they're too close to the floor for the comfort of thick, bulky speaker cables. Sometimes I wonder if speaker and amplifier makers even try to hook up their products in real-world situations.

Pairs of resistors mounted on a massive heatsink, to protect and "level tune" the tweeter and midrange drivers, are found on many Wilson speakers. On the Alexx they're conveniently placed behind a transparent panel, on a beveled surface at the back.

Setup
Wilson Audio's Peter McGrath set up the Alexxes. The speakers ended up close to where the Alexandria XLFs and other speakers have sat here, but closer than the XLFs to the front wall. McGrath did his final tuning by listening to "So Do I," from Christy Moore's This Is the Day (CD, Sony 5032552)—the same track he used to set up the Alexias in John Atkinson's listening room. Just plunked down in the approximately correct positions and still on their casters, the Alexxes' nimble sound perked up my ears. But then, McGrath's small changes in positioning produced larger-than-expected changes in Moore's voice, and in the nimbleness and clarity of the double bass.

Once McGrath was satisfied, we used the supplied floor jack to swap casters for spikes, then experimented with the Alexx's Cross-load Flow Port System, aka XLF and borrowed from the Alexandria. This allows the port to fire from the speaker's rear or front. As with the Alexandrias in my room, having the Alexxes' ports fire to the rear produced more and better bass, despite the speakers' nearness to the wall behind them.

Sound: half the price, half as good?
What did I expect from a speaker costing about half as much as the Alexandria XLF—which, before Wilson developed the WAMM Master Chronosonic, had been the company's flagship model? With the Alexx's lack of the Alexandria's rear-firing, top-mounted supertweeter, I expected a somewhat smaller soundstage, especially in the vertical dimension, and that's what I heard. Nonetheless, the Alexxes' stage still went higher than that of many other speakers. Otherwise, I didn't know what to expect.

Going from the MAXX 3 ($68,000/pair in 2009) to the much larger, far more costly Alexandria XLF ($210,000/pair) brought with it high expectations, all of which were met. The Alexandria was an improvement in every way—especially on top, where it sounded airier, sweeter, more relaxed, and yet more detailed. Most impressive was that such a tall stack of drivers could produce a 100% coherent, three-dimensional picture from less than 8' away, while managing to sound small or grand, depending on the recording.

Time alignment of the drivers' outputs is not the end-all and be-all of speaker design, but in my experience, once you've grown accustomed to the sort of minimal-baffle, time-aligned driver arrays produced by Wilson and Vandersteen Audio, when you then hear a flat slab speaker, you hear a flat slab, especially in nearfield listening environments like mine.

Even with the music on Peter McGrath's unfamiliar setup CD, it was immediately apparent—and very surprising—to me that the Alexx significantly outperformed the Alexandria XLF in some key areas. Going from Alexandria to Alexx was like pushing a high-performance car's electronic-suspension button and going from Comfort to Sport mode. From top to bottom, the Alexx's sound was nimbler and surprisingly more transparent, particularly in the midrange, where the Alexandria can be too generous. The bottom octaves were fully developed, yet fast and precise in ways I didn't think my room could support.

As I wrote in my review of Marten's Coltrane 3 ($100,000/pair), in my room the Martens produced deeper, tighter bass than the Alexandria XLFs—or, for that matter, than any Wilson speaker I've owned. So did the Vandersteen 7s—though a speaker with a powered woofer section is a different animal.

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Footnote 1: See my horizontally challenged smartphone video of the tour here.