Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

In my room, the Alexx's bottom end was far superior to the Alexandria's: deeper, faster, tighter, and, interestingly, more organically and tunefully delivered. With recordings that include deep bass, that deep bass was just there—it didn't sound as if it was being pumped into the room by a loudspeaker. In that regard, the Alexx was remarkable.

That visceral but tuneful, well-controlled bass was ideally damped: sounding neither too tight nor mechanical nor in any way "porty." I'll be interested to compare John Atkinson's measurements of the Alexx's in-room frequency response with those of the Alexandria XLF—or of any other speaker he's measured in my room.

But it was clear, based on how high the peak-power meters on my darTZeel monoblocks went, that the Alexx was somewhat less sensitive than the Alexandria, which is specified at 94dB. The Alexx's sensitivity spec is a still-high 91dB, though at 2850Hz its impedance drops to a low 1.5 ohm, and the minimum recommended amplifier power is 50W, compared to the Alexandria's 7W!

When the Alexxes were installed, I still had no idea that their paper-cone woofers were developed for and are used in the new WAMMs, though in a different alignment in a far larger enclosure. It got me thinking about the fetishized, over-exotic cone and dome substances that some believe must be better than old-school materials. Here were new woofers made of an old standby, paper pulp, that creamed the Alexandria XLF's larger drivers of Focal's "W" material. Now, that's not 100% fair—no doubt Wilson has also made advances in port implementation and tuning. And this was an in-room observation. Still, these new paper woofers—and dome tweeters of silk, which Wilson now uses instead of such exotic diaphragm materials as titanium, beryllium, or diamond—should give pause to those who insist that exotics must produce better sound. When I visited Wilson Audio, I was shown tweeter prototypes made of various exotic materials; in the end, silk won out because, to the Wilson team, it sounded and performed better.

Recently, I stood in AIR Studios' big room in London for a direct-to-disc recording session for the audiophile label Chasing the Dragon. The National Symphony Orchestra rehearsed Chabrier's tone poem España, on part of which Al Hoffmann and Dick Manning based their "Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)," which was a hit for Perry Como in 1956. From where I stood, the SPLs hit well into the 90dB range, and the sound was surprisingly bright, in a good way.

The score included some big bass-drum thwacks; as the drum was struck, I paid attention to the attack, which wasn't as sharp as I was expecting (granted, the percussion section was behind a large divider so that its sounds wouldn't bleed into the rest of the room); and to the sustain, which was more generous than I often hear reproduced by an audio system. The decays hovered in the air longer than I expected, before cleanly and quickly evaporating.

For the actual recording, we guests had to sit in the control room. While tonally reasonably neutral, the sound from this room's built-in monitor system, compared to the live sound of the orchestra in the studio, was sadly lacking in texture, color, and transparency. Especially, attacks were sluggish, sustains blunted, and decays too fast: the usefully dry, dead sound of studio monitors.

When I got home, I played Ataúlfo Argenta and the London Symphony's famous original recording of the Chabrier (Decca SXL 2020) on the Alexxes, and it sounded more convincingly alive than what I heard in the control room—but, based on a double DSD binaural head version I heard the next day, I'm sure the Chasing the Dragon LP will also sound spectacularly live!

The familiar bass-drum thwacks on that record, and the monstrous ones heard in John Williams's Liberty Fanfare, from Winds of War and Peace, performed by Lowell Graham and the National Symphonic Winds (LP, Wilson Audio/Analogue Productions APC 8823), were reproduced by the Alexxes more "perfectly," convincingly, and especially effortlessly, than I'd ever heard them from any speaker in this room. The Alexx's bottom end was positively addictive.

I surrounded "perfectly" with quotes because I've heard audiophiles and non-audiophiles alike blurt out that a given speaker's bass was perfect—a word I haven't used to describe the Alexandria XLF's bass, or the bass of any other speaker in my room. But until the arrival of the Marten Coltrane 3s, I'd thought my room couldn't support gut-pulverizing bass—the kind that pressurizes but doesn't overwhelm a space. The Alexxes, too, produced such bass—but to my ears, somewhat more transparently and more ideally damped.

Recently, when I interviewed veteran recording engineer and producer Roy Halee, he suggested I find a copy of Tayi Bebba (LP, Black Acre ACRELP006), an album by the Italian producer and DJ Cristiano Crisci, who records under the name Clap! Clap! Halee told me that Paul Simon's son had recommended it during preparations for Simon's Stranger to Stranger (LP, Concord CRE 39781-1), and that Simon and Halee had fallen under its fanciful spell. The bottom end of this record is insane. The Alexxes were installed before the record arrived, but I don't need the Alexandria XLFs back in place to know that Tayi Bebba's bass will not be as tight, extended, and "perfect" through them as it now is through the Alexxes.

You know how it goes with a great new component: You start pulling out familiar recordings with particular attributes, to hear them anew. To again test the bottom end, I played Iver Kleive and Knut Reiersrud's monumental Himmelskip (CD, Kirkelig Kulturveksted FXCD163). This atmospheric album of electric guitar and pipe organ was recorded, in a church, on a Studer A810 analog tape deck. As expected, the lower organ notes were more robust, better defined, and less "in the box," but the improvement in transparency was surprising. The guitar's image, immersed in the church's cavernous acoustic, was clarified and focused without exaggeration. Despite their size and close proximity to my listening position, the Alexandria XLFs "disappeared." The Alexxes went them one better by revealing more of the sanctuary and letting me "see" much deeper into it. This album needs a vinyl release!

The Alexx was notably more transparent than the Alexandria in the midrange: faster, cleaner, better focused, more resolving—and, to my ear, flatter. Central images were more reach-out-and-touch-it transparent—more like what electrostats deliver, but with all the dynamic slam and ability to play loud for which Wilson speakers are famous.

The Alexx also produced a more relaxing and resolved yet faster top end than the Alexandrias. This wasn't surprising, given the change from a three-way to a four-way design, in which the tweeter takes over at a higher frequency and is thus relieved of the burden of reproducing the upper-midrange frequencies. Achieving seamless driver integration, particularly in the midrange, could not have been easy to achieve, but it has been in the Alexx. The integration of the outputs of the Alexx's drivers sounds even more seamless than in the Alexandria.

All of this adds up to a $109,000/pair speaker that, in almost every way, and especially in a moderate-size room like mine, is better than the $210,000 Alexandria XLF. The Alexandria is still a superb speaker, and still is everything I said it was in the review that led the Bank of America to buy a pair for me. (Had to pay them back. Finally did.) The Alexandria is still a better choice for a larger room, and even in mine, a pair of them produces bigger—and especially taller—sound pictures than did the Alexxes. While the Alexandria's bass is neither as extended nor as fast and tight, its overall seamless sound makes it clear that its tuning is correct. Had the bass been any faster, it would have left the higher frequencies behind.

Otherwise, the Alexxes retained all of Wilson speakers' most desirable attributes, including dynamic slam, image specificity, and, especially, the ability to produce a sound that was big or small or in between, as required by the music and the recording.

A well-produced recording of solo acoustic guitar, such as Laurindo Almeida's Capitol monos, put a tonally believable, well-focused, three-dimensional guitar of convincing size between the speakers about as well as did small stand-mounts like the Joseph Audio Pulsar, but with the more expansive spatial context that only a larger speaker can produce.

Big as they were, the Alexxes "disappeared" as physical objects from my room even as they hung solid images in three-dimensional space better than any speakers I've had here or in my former listening room—and those speakers included the Audio Physic Virgo II, which was an astonishing re-creator of the illusion of space, regardless of price.

Conclusions
Wilson Audio's demonstrations of the Alexx at audio shows in 2016 didn't prepare me for what I heard at home—then again, neither had the demos of the Alexandria XLF. But in both cases, those demos dropped hints of what might be possible.

From the bottom to the top, Wilson Audio's Alexx was as enjoyable to listen to at low volumes as when cranked to club and concert SPLs. It never sounded strained at high volume, or soft and indistinct at low. In my experience, that's a quality shared by all Wilson speakers, along with dynamic authority and top-to-bottom coherence —even if that's not always evident at hi-fi shows.

Their last few generations of models have added some things to Wilson's attractive mix of sonic characteristics: airy, open highs, as well as transparent and silky-smooth mids. The Alexx exhibited all of these desirable qualities, each of them done better, and with greater top-to-bottom coherence, than I've heard from any other Wilson speaker here.

if you're fortunate enough to own these $109,000 speakers and if you're fortunate enough to own a copy of the stunning 1964 Decca recording of Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, with the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (LP, UK Decca SXL 6110), play it through the Alexxes after returning home from a live concert. This work, aka Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell, is an exercise in orchestral fireworks. The woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings—especially the "basement" strings—are reproduced well enough for you to suspend tonal and textural disbelief as Britten, family by family and instrument by instrument, introduces each element of the orchestra, which you'll then "see" before you as convincingly and naturally as if you were hearing the piece live.

The Alexxes cleared away the Alexandrias' slight bit of midrange fog to reveal delicate, solid, well-focused, three-dimensional images on a well-defined, transparent, stable soundstage. The xylophone, castanets, bass drum, and triangle had never sounded so convincing. And then, in the fugue, as Britten reassembles the orchestra, instrument by instrument, until all are again playing together—you may find yourself laughing in unexpected pleasure. I did.

The very-limited-edition WAMM Master Chronosonic aside, the Alexx is easily the best big speaker Wilson Audio Specialties has produced.