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The Fifth Element #29 Some Recommendations

Some recommendations
I'm running out of space, but I want to point out some products at various price tiers that, in my opinion, you can buy once and buy right.

ESP's Concert Grand, Aerial's 20T, and Wilson Benesch's Chimera, each in its own way, can make a case that it should be your "get off the merry-go-round" loudspeaker choice. The price spread here is from the low $20k (Chimera) to the mid-$30k (Concert Grand). Careful auditioning is obviously called for.

At the next price tier down (ca $12.5k), Shahinian's Diapason is the "love at first hearing or you'll never get it…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system

How can a reviewer possibly put a value on a loudspeaker as costly as the Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM? When he reviewed Wilson's WATT 3/Puppy 2 system ($12,900-$16,000/pair, depending on finish) a few years back (footnote 1), John Atkinson said that it was "one of the more expensive loudspeakers around." The Grand SLAMM costs almost five times as much!

On the other hand, we've all heard about the legendary Wilson WAMM system, which costs a staggering $130,000. At a mere $65,000, the X-1 could be regarded as something of a bargain, especially as it's said to provide a…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 2

In his previous designs, Dave Wilson has shown an uncompromising approach to enclosures and their acoustic signatures. In the case of the WATT, itself a landmark in low coloration, a cast, mineral-impregnated resin material was used. Many panel materials were researched for the X-1's bass cabinet, including everything you might have thought or heard of, and then some. Wilson especially sought to avoid the characteristic, if not necessarily unmusical, sonic signature of wood and wood-composite materials. That overlay of "panel sound" common to the construction of nearly all box loudspeakers…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 3

The cones are made of a glass-fiber-reinforced pulp impregnated with a catalyzed resin, and are both rigid and pistonic over the required frequency range. Placed uppermost on the baffle, the 12" driver has an additional surface treatment to damp cone resonant modes, since in terms of its natural response and position in the stack, it reaches further into the low midrange than the 15" unit. The edge suspensions are foam half-roll surrounds of high mechanical "Q."

These are low-loss drivers, with high electrical damping and consequently great electromagnetic control (high Qm and low Qts, a…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 4

The X-1 revealed such great differences between speaker cables that it was hard to be dogmatic about which product was responsible for certain sounds we heard: the X-1, or the cables themselves. At an early stage of the initial installation, the Krell KRC-2 preamp was temporarily laid on the carpet. So analytical were these speakers that the placement of coupling cones under the preamp was immediately recognized in the tighter bass and cleaner mid! The same trick was repeated, this time with the Krell KSA-200S power amp. Such transparency on the part of the X-1 promised much entertainment…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 5

It was the kind of sound you just can't ignore—it grabbed attention and held it, so secure was its mastery of audio replay. Putting aside the wayward experiences of the setting-up period, my renewed first impressions were of a crisp, dry, and highly controlled sound. No boom or overhang was present in the bass, and yet its response extended to low frequencies. There was no obvious weakness or impairment of midrange tonal balance. The "crispness" would appear to result from genuine control and desirably fast transient decay, and not a falsified frequency response.

Stereo imaging was very…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 6

Analog vs Digital: On occasion, there was a hint of midrange forwardness, as well as a touch of metallic edge in the X-1/Grand SLAMM's presence region. This touch of character varied considerably with amplification and signal sources (which so far had all been digital). Tubed electronics certainly helped in this respect; I'm indebted to the Conrad-Johnson Premier Twelve and Audio Research VT150 power amplifiers, which proved marvelously synergistic with the X-1.

The omission of analog sources up to this point had not been a deliberate choice, but a result of the UK's unusually high July…

Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM loudspeaker system Page 7

Installing the X-1 showed just how differently these two High End systems reacted to the same room. The speaker alignment, of course, had to be done from scratch, but at first, the X-1s were a bit of a disaster. Inexplicably, there was almost no bass. The speakers sounded overly dry and deadened, lacking space and air, and sounding both forward and lean.

Several lines of attack were tried to solve these multiple problems. As the X-1 is a single system, its placement has to be simultaneously optimized for both the bass and midrange performance. I had first to find where the low-frequency…

David Wilson: Speaking the Same Language

Wes Phillips: How did you come to design the WATT—and the Puppy?

David Wilson: I began making serious recordings back in the late '70s, and monitored them on a variety of commercially available speakers. By about 1980 I had developed the first generation of the WAMM system, on which I would listen to the recordings critically. Generally, what I heard in the field on the monitor speakers and what I heard from the WAMMs was in agreement—the WAMMs told us a lot more, of course, but if a recording sounded okay on the monitors, then it would sound pretty good on the WAMMs.

For some…

David Wilson: Speaking the Same Language Page 2

Phillips: What has differentiated the successive generations of WATTs from one another?

Wilson: The enclosure has stayed the same—the geometry of that enclosure and its structural integrity are hard to improve upon. The 6.5" drivers have always had paper cones—in fact, the first three generations used the same bass driver, a SEAS unit which sounds wonderful in the midrange. I always voice a speaker by starting in the midrange and gradually working up an octave, down an octave, up another octave, down another octave—which is how I "vowel" a WAMM when setting them up in the field. We were…