Wilson Audio

Sasha DAW...

#TuneTot is the latest product from the Wilson Special Applications Engineering™ (WSAE) team. While its name pays homage to the first WSAE product, it is a modern technical tour de force designed to offer the timbral beauty, dynamic nuance, soundstage resolution, and transparency—all the hallmarks of Wilson loudspeakers design culture—but do so in environments which are hostile to all of those qualities.

Another #AWARD🥇 for #Alexia Series 2!

Subwoofers are de rigueur in home theater systems, but their history at Wilson Audio long predates theater surround systems. Dave Wilson's first commercial product, the multi-cabinet WAMM®, represented his effort to build a speaker capable of reproducing the full range of music, including those lowest organ notes.

The WAMM employed two six-foot-tall bass cabinets. Dave understood from the beginning that—when it comes to reproducing the lowest frequencies with dynamic realism and without distortion—there is no substitute for moving large volumes of air. Utilizing and expanding upon the woofer technologies first developed for the WATCH Dog Passive Subwoofer, state-of-the-art, subterranean bass and impact is now possible in a relatively compact cabinet a mere five feet tall.

No other subwoofer of any technology or any configuration is capable of reproducing the bottom octave and subsonic region at the technological or musical level achieved by the Thor’s Hammer. It is truly state of the art.

The second generation WATCH Dog subwoofer has undergone the most radical redesign of any of the WATCH system components. Specifically, it has been transformed from an active subwoofer (with a built-in amplifier) to a passive, unamplified unit. Two considerations drove the design change: Quality and Flexibility.

There's a widespread myth that since subwoofers operate in the low to subsonic frequency range, the sonic quality of the amplifier used to drive them is not critical. Couple that with the fact that the FTC-mandated criteria for power amplifier specifications don't apply to active subwoofers—a loophole which allows manufacturers to make wildly inflated performance claims for what is, in many cases, and with no pun intended, severely sub-standard amplifiers built into their subwoofers.

Superior low-frequency performance—whether as part of a home theater system or in a two-channel music system—demands high quality, high current amplification. The active WATCH Dog certainly provides both. Nevertheless, listening tests clearly show that the most cohesive systems are those with matching amplifiers driving all of the loudspeakers, including the subwoofers.

WATCH Dog Subwoofer The new passive WATCH Dog provides the most cost-effective and flexible approach to that goal, whether in a single unit or a multiple unit configuration. Key to this flexibility is the new external WATCH Dog Controller, highlighted in the next section.

A true subwoofer, capable of clean, distortion-free sub-frequency response, has to be sufficiently large to move the volume of air which visceral frequencies require. As hard as some manufacturers may try, there's no getting around the laws of physics on this one. The good news is, the passive WATCH Dog is 40% smaller than its predecessor while maintaining the same internal tuned volume. So the new WATCH Dog is easier to place in your listening environment with no sacrifice in performance.

Special Applications projects have a long and illustrious history at Wilson Audio. In 1983, Dave Wilson needed a small location monitor for the series of audiophile-acclaimed classical music recordings he was doing at the time. Finding nothing suitable on the market, he went into his garage and built the original WATT®. Its truncated pyramid shape, constructed from mineral-filled methacrylic, broke the mold of then-current loudspeaker design and has been widely copied since for one reason: it worked extremely well. Mated to its dedicated woofer enclosure, the WATT/Puppy, now called Sasha W/P, continues to be Wilson Audio’s longest running and best-selling loudspeaker.

Alida is the latest Special Applications product from Wilson Audio. It was designed to offer the timbral neutrality, dynamic response, soundstage depth, and transparency of floor-standing Wilson loudspeakers, but to do so in the extremely adverse conditions of wall-mounted applications. The Alida is a perfect example of performance disproportionate to size.

Unlike most wall-mount speakers, Alida possesses all the salient attributes of Wilson loudspeakers: dynamic agility, tonal expression, and musical beauty. The Alida incorporates the same anti-jitter crossover technology that underlies the astonishingly grain-free transparency and musicality of full-size Wilson loudspeakers. With strong power handling capacity and low-end frequency response reaching 40 Hz, this speaker will forever change the perception of just how good a wall-mounted speaker can sound.

The WATCH® system [Wilson Audio Theater Comes Home] was born out of the recognition that the same factors that greatly enhance the emotional impact of music reproduction are applicable to motion picture soundtracks. Some interesting trials validate a counter-intuitive thesis: when viewers were asked to rate the impact of two different home theater systems—one with larger, better quality video, but with a middling sound system, and the second with a smaller screen but a state-of-the-art audio system—they invariably chose the latter system as the more emotionally involving.

The result would hardly surprise people who make movies. Since the advent of the “talkies,” filmmakers have realized that dialogue, music, and sound effects carry a disproportionate weight of the emotion in a motion picture.

Introducing the newest iteration of Wilson’s venerated center channel loudspeaker: the Convergent Synergy edition.

Mezzo is only the latest product from the Wilson Special Applications Engineering Team ™. This group of products recognizes there are situations where the typical floorstanding loudspeaker fails to adequately meet needs that fall outside the typical listening room/home theater environments.

Wilson has a long and storied history of developing products for specific applications. The first product to fit that definition was the Wilson Audio Tiny Tot, or WATT©. Long before it became the mid and upper range part of the venerable WATT/Puppy© combo (the best selling over $10k loudspeaker in audio history), it was originally designed as a portable location monitor. The WATT played a significant role in the series of audiophile-quality records Dave engineered in the mid-nineteen-eighties. The WATT's original heritage was thereafter evident by the machined aluminum handle that traversed the rear blades, a safe and convenient way for Dave to carry the monitor to and from recording locales.

When used as a center channel, Mezzo seamlessly matches the acoustic signature of Wilson's remarkable Sasha. Indeed, the Mezzo features a driver complement nearly identical to the Sasha, the exception being the midrange driver, which is borrowed from the legendary Alexandria X-2©. The Mezzo also provides an unprecedented level of musical accuracy in music systems and home theaters where its low-profile form solves architectural challenges, such as in those installations where a tall loudspeaker would block wall-to-wall cinema screens, the view afforded by large windows, or would obstruct wall-hanging artwork. Whether it is used as a center channel in conjunction with Sasha, MAXX, or Alexandria, or as a main loudspeaker, Mezzo matches the tonal beauty, dynamic speed, tonal sophistication, resolution, and sense of "thereness" that are hallmarks of Sasha W/P.

Polaris—The North Star—anchors the rotating night sky as the immovable center above the North Pole. The task of a center channel loudspeaker is to provide the grounded, centered, aural point around which swirl the action, music, and emotion of the home theater experience.

Polaris—The North Star—is, in reality, a triple star system. Similarly, Polaris ™— the loudspeaker—was conceived to serve more than a single function. Polaris is a low-profile flagship speaker designed to solve architectural challenges such as where a tall loudspeaker would obstruct a window view or intersect a wall-to-wall theater screen. Whether it is employed as a reference quality center channel, or as a low-profile music system, Polaris is engineered to achieve the same levels of performance as Wilson Audio's flagship loudspeakers, Alexandria® Series 2 and MAXX® Series 3.

To create a low profile loudspeaker worthy to occupy the same space (literally or figuratively) as Alexandria and MAXX meant that several design challenges had to be met.

Polaris had to incorporate Wilson's flagship loudspeakers' characteristic tonal accuracy and coherence. It had to meet the same standards of dynamic contrast and speed. Finally, it had to achieve the level of transparency, detail, and spatial resolution that set Alexandria and MAXX at the pinnacle of audio art.

In short, the same synergy of drivers, cabinet materials, crossovers, and Aspherical Propagation Delay geometry that distinguish Wilson's state-of-the-art loudspeakers had to work in a radically new form factor—a reference quality center-channel and low-profile loudspeaker.

With traditional loudspeaker designs, near-boundary placements wreak havoc on the performance characteristics audiophiles most prize. The soundstage collapses, dynamics are compromised, and a smooth, linear frequency response becomes a distant memory.

The original Duette was designed to overcome these limitations, while still offering a freestanding performance option. With the Series 2 Duette, we decided to forgo the inevitable compromises inherent in that approach, and concentrate on creating a loudspeaker designed solely for near boundary situations, which nevertheless boast the same dynamics, soundstage width and depth, and harmonic beauty of our larger, floorstanding loudspeakers.

Yvette draws from this rich tradition. But, perhaps, more importantly, it derives its core technology directly from the enormous research-and-development reservoir of what is perhaps Wilson’s most prolific era of innovation to date. Wilson’s latest Sasha Series 2, the Alexia, the leading-edge Alexx have all informed the Yvette project, in some cases, with identical components. And like the Alexx, the Yvette was developed alongside Dave Wilson’s new WAMM project.

Yvette is the most advanced and musically refined single-enclosure loudspeaker in Wilson’s history.

Like all recent Wilson Audio loudspeakers, the Yvette is the beneficiary of Wilson’s state-of-the-art composites research, the heart of which is the laser vibrometer. Beyond using the best enclosure materials, Yvette’s architecture is driven by two factors: time-domain performance, and extremely low-resonance and vibration contribution.

The enclosure is built primarily from two Wilson-developed composites: the third generation of X-Material, an extremely well-damped and inert composite, and S-Material, which was developed for exquisite midrange performance.

The S-Material midrange baffle is angled to its own plane in order to optimize its time-domain relationship between the woofer below and the tweeter above. Wilson’s engineers designed a new venting system for the midrange enclosure, similar to those found on the XLF, Alexx, Alexia, and Sasha Series 2.

The tweeter baffle is built from X-Material, and, like the mid baffle, is optimized for time-domain performance and dispersion. The X-Material woofer baffle is also positioned optimally in the vertical array. As is true for the Sabrina, Alexx, and the upcoming WAMM, Yvette’s bass baffle angles back slightly toward the midrange for better dispersion accuracy in the upper bass, and more optimized time alignment between the woofer and midrange. The lowest section of the enclosure, below the woofer, changes direction again and is perpendicular to the ground. This facilitates a smaller footprint when compared to the Sophia.

Bracing in this system is more ambitious and heroic than any previous single-enclosure system—another direct result of laser vibrometer testing. Even the tweeter grille design was scrutinized and meticulously designed, with a frame shape that reduces acoustic interaction.

Wilson’s exclusive resistor tuning system, located in an isolated chamber on the rear of the enclosure, can be accessed through a convenient cover on the rear of the loudspeaker. It features improved hardware and accessibility over that found in the Sophia 3.

The Yvette shape and overall aesthetic may call to mind the Sasha Series 2 and elements of the Sabrina. She is simple and organic, with sculpted lines that remind the viewer of the important function her shape serves.

In conjunction with the WAMM project, Wilson Audio recently completed yet another wave of research into tweeter technology and driver materials. Tweeters with domes constructed from beryllium and diamond—the seemingly ubiquitous choice of many loudspeaker engineers—were developed, tested, and rigorously compared to the latest version of Wilson’s Convergent Synergy Tweeter. While many of these designs held promise on paper, they all fell well short of the musicality, natural resolution, and coherence of Wilson’s tweeter.

The Yvette employs the MK III version of the Convergent Synergy Tweeter, which is also found in the Sasha Series 2 and the Alexx. The MK III features Wilson’s latest thinking on rear-wave diffraction and ultra-low resonance rear chambers. It mates seamlessly with Wilson’s proprietary midrange driver, which is the same unit found in the Alexandria XLF.

The ten-inch woofer chosen for the Yvette was (one of two woofers) originally developed for the Alexia, and is a cousin to the ten-inch in the Alexx and the upcoming WAMM. These newest series of bass drivers are partially responsible for Wilson’s unique blend of dynamic contrast, impact, speed, and musicality. When installed in Yvette’s bass enclosure, which was optimized for this driver in terms of volume and resonance control, it pushes the boundary of musical accuracy, extension, and dynamics for such a compact loudspeaker.

While not adjustable in the time domain as are Wilson’s larger, modular designs, the Yvette benefits from Wilson’s patented testing protocols and is uniquely time coherent for a single-enclosure design. Wilson continues to be the only loudspeaker company in the world that fully understands the musically deleterious artifacts caused by time-domain smearing endemic to all multi-driver systems, and has, for decades,

The WATT/Puppy is perhaps the most salient and iconic example of Dave Wilson’s lifelong quest for the absolute sound. The WATT, the upper module of the combination, began in the mid-eighties as a utilitarian recording tool, a portable, ultra-high resolution location monitor for the recordings he was then making. The WATT was later paired with a dedicated woofer module—the “Puppy.” The WATT/Puppy combo became Wilson Audio’s largest selling product. The reason was simple: it was a truly compact, full-range loudspeaker that could fit easily in most real-world listening rooms while still offering the bass speed and extension, the dynamics, and musicality associated with much larger systems.

With the advent of Sasha W/P, Dave and his team re-imagined the platform as a unified system. The previously discrete WATT, which, emblematic of its location-monitor heritage, could function as a stand-alone loudspeaker, was discontinued. The Sasha was redesigned from the ground up as an integrated system, allowing Wilson to optimize every detail to achieve the next quantum leap in compact loudspeaker performance.

Research and development is a never-ending process at Wilson Audio. Inevitably, technology that didn’t exist at the debut of Sasha W/P Series 1 influenced the design and execution of Sasha Series-2. Two prime examples: Laser Vibrometry Analysis, long used in automotive and aerospace applications, allows us to measure mechanical vibrations in our cabinets down to the level of nanometers. This invaluable data allows Wilson to optimize the composite structure of the cabinet, as well as the position and thickness of the internal braces. The Wilson Convergent Synergy tweeter was developed for the flagship Alexandria XLF. We next adapted it for the three-module Alexia. For the Sasha Series-2, a new version was designed specifically for its two-module platform and features a bespoke rear-wave chamber.

Dave Wilson wanted to share with you a list of his favorite Wilson Audiophile Recordings. We created a playlist on TIDAL to share those tracks with you!