There are two kinds of drivers inside Wilson Audio loudspeakers: 1) Those that are custom made to Wilson specifications, and 2) those that are purchased from an OEM supplier and re-manufactured to Wilson specifications. The former category includes the midrange driver first developed for Alexandria Series 2, and subsequently deployed in a slighly simplified version in both MAXX Series 3 and Sasha W/P. You can read about the genesis of this extraordinary midrange here. This unit represents a true co-engineering effort between Wilson and a new driver manufacturer.
Regardless of its initial provenance, however, every driver that arrives at our factory is destined for a series of rigorous performance tests.
The driver is the one moving part in a loudspeaker, the one that’s doing all the heavy lifting. It needs to meet a set of design criteria to begin with and maintain those measurements over time. There are myriad variables in the chain of reproduced music, a circumstance calculated to make most audiophiles wonder from time to time: How do I really know my loudspeakers sound like what the designer intended? One of Wilson Audio’s quality control objectives is to remove that worry from the list of life’s uncertainties. |
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Our manufacturing tolerances are chosen to assure the listener that not only are his loudspeakers precisely level matched channel-to-channel, but if the owner had the opportunity to cart his speakers back to the Wilson factory he would find their sound indistinguishable from the final prototype of that model. Each unit that comes off the production line is rigorously checked against the reference. This test is permanently archived so if a driver is damaged, an identical replacement can be sent. Comprehensive performance testing is the key to ensuring these things remain true. (Remember, Dave Wilson cut his professional teeth designing tests; it’s one of his favorite things to do.) So with Dave’s encouragement, quality control technician Dave Christensen subjects his drivers to regimes far more stringent than industry standards. These include tests, not only of frequency and distortion, but also in the time and propagation-delay domain—tests designed to reveal how a driver actually sounds in a real-world environment. To this end, the range of acceptable deviation from the reference for every Wilson loudspeaker is plus or minus .5db. Pull Dave Christensen aside, though, and he’ll confess he really likes to go for +/- .2db. |
A Message from Dave Wilson • Passion • A Vision • Teamwork • Materials • Drivers • Crossovers & Cables • The WilsonGloss Finish • From Our Place to Yours |
