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A cone at rest tends to stay at rest, and a cone in motion tends to stay in motion. Based on what he
heard in Vienna, it was immediately apparent to Dave Wilson that, if he was going to achieve the
clarity and alacrity of musical events in the same way they were presented in the Musikverein, he would
need a midrange driver that could start and stop quickly enough to reveal information occuring within
20 milliseconds (twenty thousandths of a second) of a an initial cone excursion. He needed a driver
able to start and stop on the proverbial dime.
For years, Wilson Audio, like many speaker companies, has sourced its drivers from outside, specialized
manufacturers. These units have never been off-the-shelf drop-ins. Once the raw drivers arrive at the
Wilson factory, they're extensively modified, or, in some cases, essentially "re-manufactured"
on site to Wilson's precise specifications and tolerances.
With this new driver, Dave and the Wilson team, have, in strategic partnership with a new driver
manufacturer, co-designed a new product from the ground up to raise the performance bar in the critical
midrange. To meet the design challenge of a highly rigid but low moving mass cone, we co-engineered a
special blend of carbon fiber and paper pulp.
Because the midrange is where the heart of music resides, the Alexandria midrange has an extremely wide
bandwidth, so as to reveal the true color and tone of musical instruments. Most importantly, because of
its ability to start and stop instantaneously, it is capable of reproducing the subtle dynamic cues and
low-level reflections that we recognize from live music. (A telling anecdote in this regard: while doing
direct A:B comparisons of the new and old Alexandrias with a live concert recording, low level traffic
noise outside the venue was clearly audible for the first time with the new driver.
Subsequent to the introduction of the Series 1 Alexandria, Wilson Audio developed our most advanced tweeter
for the MAXX Series 2 and later, the WATT/Puppy System 8. That design has now been further refined and
improved for the Alexandria Series 2.
Once again, the overriding objective was to lower the noise floor, and thus increase low-level resolution,
so that the new tweeter could play in the same league as the newly designed midrange. The primary culprit
for tweeter noise is the unabsorbed reflections from the back wave. The Alexandria tweeter features a new
damping material that effectively randomizes and disperses these reflections. The new design immediately
lowered the output of the tweeter by 1.5dB, the sum-total of which represented the noise component of the
previous version.
A new milled sub-assembly of X material provides a black, resonance-free background for the quietest, most
grain-free tweeter in our history.
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