Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

I am perplex at the fairly wide and deep suck-up between 1000hz and 1800Hz?
That can’t be good. What would cause that?

Better value for the money than Alexia2? :-) ..........

Value for Money is not a descriptive applicable to any Wilson Product and never has been. I sold Wilson in 1980s

Wilson aspires to be an exclusive Luxury Product for Deep Pocket Social Elites. It's a Velvet Rope Company that coddles it's owners like the Chicago Rolls Royce Dealer took care of it's small fleet of exclusive ownership.

Wilson products will always place as Class A Recommended.

I kinda liked Wilsons but not for price/performance reasons.

They play well, or at least as well as the electronics in Front of them..

Wilson would demo them using Tape and the nicest electronics, they always sound "Good". I still preferred Magnepan instead ( as do most Audiophiles )

Got mucho dinero and wanna show it, buy Wilsons.

Tony in Michigan

ps. my 22 yr old Sennheiser HD 580s have nicer transducers and sound better !

ps. Infinity IRS has always crushed Wilson's performance. New PS AN loudspeakers are assuring even higher performance realizations.

Got to listen to this speaker last month. It is bright and boomy and that's before I saw the measurements.

Glad I was reviewing an amp that had tone controls because I absolutely needed them. So far from neutral or well balanced.

To me it has always been a puzzle how Wilson ever became "High End".

Look at the impedance, not even the best amp of the world will perform better at these low impedances most often lowest in the area, where music contains most energy.

And then the time domain measurements. Midrange Driver units working in negative phase, lots of delayed energy.

It seems like Wilson only puts their attention to things that are visible from the outside. Heavy cabinets, expensive terminals and a lot of details with minor influence of performance.

A state of the art speaker should have a mostly even and not to low impedance, allowing the amp to perform at its best. And of course all drivers should be connected in phase, and should have a waterfall plot with absolutely no signs of resonance and as little delayed energy as possible. In most cases the dispersion pattern should be optimized off-axis, as the off-axis energy is dominant in the listening room. If so, most energy released will have the same frequency response.

Some of this should be logical stuff. But to me the measurements look pretty terrible, and I don´t really understand that Stereophile are not calling them by their name "Idiosyncratic"

... Wilson's Daryl Wilson and Harbeth's Alan Shaw?

Mr. Shaw asserts that his bespoke plastic formulation (aka Radial) is the ideal bass/midrange cone material, while Wilson continues to use some variation of paper.

Likewise, Harbeth keeps using decades-old BBC-derived thin-wall, lossy-jointed style wood cabinets, while Wilson has developed their proprietary X-material and S-material composite materials.

In addition, include a direct comparison between comparably priced speakers from each company - for example the Harbeth Monitor 40.2 versus the Wilson Sabrina.

at the Cash Register.

Wilson has been winning it, continues to win it with Audio Magazines & Audio Shows Proclaiming Wilson the Winner.

Anyone hoping for a Serious Loudspeaker Debate need only observe the Andrew Jones vs. Steve G. 2019 AXPONA Seminar in 3 Parts, it's brilliant.

Wilsons are sort of like a fully loaded Chevy Suburban or Cadillac Escalade

Harbeths are sort of like the Mini-Cooper S

I'm a ProAc Tablette lover ( for what it's worth )

Tony in Michigan

... price-wise the Harbeth product line-up tops out where the Wilson product line-up is just getting started. Maybe the sales success of the 40th Anniversary limited edition models will make Alan Shaw sufficiently cynical to create his own $750K magnum opus speaker before he decides to retire.

Regarding Steve Guttenberg playing the straight man to Andrew
Jones at AXPONA, although he discussed tweeter materials, unfortunately AJ didn't get to talk about materials for bass/midrange drivers. The product literature for the ELAC Debut series states that the aramid fiber used is superior to paper or polypropylene. More expensive AJ-designed models use aluminum. I'd liked to have heard him expound on that topic.

Wilson speakers, in general, seem to work well with D'Agostino amps and pre-amps :-) .........

Hi, is there any reason in particular the polar measurements shown in Figures 3 and 4 are always normalised to the on-axis measurement in your reviews? I always find it a bit difficult to read the polar measurements in relation to the on-axis this way, especially if the on-axis originally had a big peak or dip that smooths out in the polar ones but due to normalisation shows instead as an opposite dip or peak respectively. I think it is counterintuitive and can be misleading if you fail to notice the normalisation. You could just show the actual polar measurements and that would require no interpretation.

Per the Wilson Yvette manual, the midrange and tweeter levels are adjustable. Please keep this in mind when reading my previous comments, it is VERY likely the dealer had the midrange deliberately suppressed, as they were also playing out of phase when I first heard them.

https://wilsonaudio.com/products/yvette

The reviewer, who has heard many speakers, claims he'd never found one in which he felt so naturally inside the recording space... At 86 dB/w/m sensitivity this seems quite an unlikely claim... Only gazillions VTL watts could make these $25,000 things move, but for how long? As for the lengthy "animal" box description and the foul language, and yet packing the "animal" back to its distributor, this review is quite unconvincing.

I switched to the Sabrinas (from Focal) a couple of years ago. I mainly did this to simplify and move away from separates. I am driving them with a Pass INT60. The Focals were hard to drive too, but mainly in one region due, if I remember correctly, to their 4th order xovers. They were faster, a bit more analytical, and could be sibilant at times. I find the Pass drives the Sabrinas easily and the sound is a bit more relaxed. They definitely don’t have the definition of the Be tweeters in the upper registers. I am not sold about the way they look - one guest thought they looked like baby coffins. In all, this being a game of compromises, I am very happy with my switch to Wilson.

I do think there is much to legitimately criticize with Wilsons, and I rarely see reviews that are very critical. On the plus side, their cabinet construction is second to none. There are a ton of “high end” speakers that continue to use MDF and wood glue. Wilsons are rock solid and dead.

I do not own Wilson speakers. I auditioned a few mostly driven by high-end tubes in well-controlled rooms. It was apparent to me they are very hard to optimize. I came to a quick conclusion that it would take electronics and cables 3-10x cost of Wilson speakers in order to sound truly great. My uneducated guess is - their tweeter just sucks!! Don't get me wrong. I am not saying they sound bad. Peakier treble than some, slower than some, hard to position than some, but Wilsons certainly do not sound 'bad' by any mean.

I find Brian's system was already optimized for Wilson. He simply swapped Sophia 2 to Yvette in a system which was built for Wilson. His amp, VTL, is known for a good pairing with Wilson. His old VTL Ichiban's are warmer sounding than the current generation, which must have helped with Yvette. In my humble opinion, for most people who drop Yvette in their current system should never expect such a praiseworthy sound. As an objective reviewer, I wish Brian had included other amps in his audition. As an objective magazine, I wish Stereophile did not assign a Wilson loving person to review another Wilson.

Anyway, Wilson looks gorgeous to my eyes. To me, they are a drool-worthy eye candy, which sounds 'good' out of the box - but is capable of sounding 'great' with careful pairings and a lot, A LOT, of efforts. However, doesn't that sum up the most high-end speakers? For the look alone I'd love to own a pair at one point.

I have owned the Harbeth Super HL5 Plus speakers for two months. I spent two hours today auditioning the Sabrina's and the Yvette's.

Cutting right to the chase, my Harbeths I hear, the Yvettes I hear and feel. What do I mean? To start with, the Yvette's are every bit as good in the treble and midrange as the Harbeths (I think the Yvettes reveal slightly better micro details). However, the Yvettes not only reveal a lot more detail in the mid-bass region, it actually creates something akin to a "compression wave" in the room. This is not to be confused with the bass is "boomier" or "thumpier", it is much much more than that.

With the Harbeths playing loudly in my family room I can hear the music clearly, but I'm missing the room actually reacting to the music. If you listen to live music in a small room you will know what I mean by this.

For example, if I strike a C1 note on my grand piano a listener can hear the note play, the Bass Effect, reverb and decay, and also the room reaction to the playing of that note. The Yvette's are the closest thing I've heard that replicates the third effect most closely with the real thing.

So.... As far as music accuracy is concerned across all frequency ranges, my Harbeth scores an 8/10, the Yvette's score a 9/10. But as far as "you are actually at the music venue" is concerned, the Harbeth's score a 7/10, the Yvette's a 10/10.

This rather obscure observation may not matter to most folks, which is perfectly OK. I've been listening to speakers in the $10-$25 range for 40 years, and only today did I hear this effect. Whether or not this justifies the large price for these speakers is not for me to say.

Hi, Can someone explain me what's the "Minimum motion notch" with details ?

Regards,

"The Yvette, on the other hand, is based on the same philosophy, and begins with the same design goals, as its larger siblings: the elimination of cabinet vibrations, and the precise alignment of its drivers' positions so that their outputs all reach the listener's ears at precisely the same time."

No. They don't. Your own measurements show they don't. In a non-coincident speaker this is possible at only one spot in space if done correctly. There's no way that happens at any reasonable listening position for the speaker in the measurements.

Brian,
Thanks for such a great write up. Stereophile as a mag is one of thew few sources I read which i can trust. I would love to know if the sound of the Yvette's specially in the mid ranges are that much better than the Sabrinas. IU have tried to do a side by side comp but have not been able to get the dealer to set up both. I would love to hear what folks think? As much as sound is subjective, i do hope one can be objective and say yes/no - one sound was definitely a lot better than the other. ANything less in my opinion would not justify the 10K price diff.

OK I am very perplexed by the latest Recommended Components rating for this speaker. First off, they have the Sabrina as Class A, and the Yvette as Class B? Huh? Plus, the reviewer mentioned in the Yvette's listing was Robert Deutsch. Mr. Dampkroger, this was your review correct?