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Alexandria X-2

Alexandria X-2

Overview

Wilson Audio

Alexandria X-2

In the Spring of 2006, Dave and Sheryl Lee Wilson were fortunate enough to attend a rehearsal of the Mahler Symphony #2, "The Resurrection". In the second movement there’s a passage dominated by massed pizzicato strings, and Dave was suddenly struck by what he was hearing. The music was not fortissimo, but it seemed to leap from the stage with holographic alacrity. All the dynamic shadings of attack and decay were palpable. He could hear the resonant fullness of the wood of the cellos and double basses. As it did for Bruno Walter, the moment proffered him a revelation of how beautiful music could be. He turned to Sheryl Lee and said, “That's what the new Alexandria needs to sound like.”
Gustav Mahler
acoustic decay chart

Dave learned that what he was hearing in the Musikverein comprised two distinct elements in the time domain: (1) Early Sound. This is the direct sound from the instrument, followed by an initial time delay gap of approximately 20 milliseconds, followed by the first reflected sound arriving within the first 80 milliseconds. (2) Reverberant Sound. The last remaining reflections arrive and decay over the next 1.5 to 2 seconds. It’s the reverberant reflections which generally impart the “sound” of the hall, but the makeup of the Early Sound (direct + initial time gap + earliest reflections) determines the beauty, the richness, and the clarity of the music itself.

Just as it seems remarkable that a seasoned (and, one might even suppose, jaded) conductor could find something revelatory about music offered to him by a particular concert hall, so it might seem surprising to learn that Dave Wilson himself concluded an instrument as revealing and musical as the original Alexandria was obscuring some vital part of the music.

Nevertheless, that’s what he realized, and at the same time, recognized he knew—in theory at least—what to do about it.?

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.

A new milled sub-assembly of X material provides a black, resonance-free background for the quietest, most grain-free tweeter in our history.

A musical waveform is a complex overlay of frequencies, amplitudes, and phase relationships. With current technology, no single transducer can reproduce the full range of music at realistic sound pressure levels and maintain consistent dispersion. The only practical solution to this problem is a multiple driver array, but multiple drivers introduce their own set of problems, chief among them the challenge of preserving the precise time relationships of the musical waveform. The fact is, misalignment of the drivers by small fractions of an inch will audibly degrade transient performance, soundstage height, width, and depth, as well as introduce tonal anomalies that destroy the otherwise convincing "presence" of an instrument or a singer's voice.



The key to solving this problem lies in the vertical alignment of the various drivers in an adjustable modular array so that each driver's waveform propagation "matches up" with its neighbors' in such a way as to create the sonic equivalent of a single point source.

Wilson's patented Adjustable Propagation Delay has long set the standard for precise driver positioning in order to ensure correct propagation alignment for a wide range of listening locations. Alexandria took this technology a step further with the introduction of Aspherical Propagation Delay. Not only can each driver module move forward and back in the time domain, but each module rotates on its polar axis to achieve optimal dispersion for any chosen listening postion.