Duette
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Overview
Duette
Duette 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 environments (such as against walls or in bookshelves) which are instrinsically hostile to all of those qualities.
Then, it was given a dual personality so that it could succeed as a floor-standing loudspeaker as well.
Music and home theater are increasingly part of contemporary lifestyles.
Until now, the visually pleasing architectural integration of sound into our home environments has meant accepting serious sonic compromises.
Placing a loudspeaker on the wall, for example, creates back reflections that destroy the time domain purity and timbral accuracy of the signal. Soundstage cues are lost and the frequency response is skewed.
duettes wall mounted
duette horizontal in bookshelf
If the loudspeaker is mounted in custom cabinets or sits on a bookshelf, diffraction comes into play. Early reflections from the adjacent surfaces compromise high frequencies, again wreaking havoc in the time domain and introducing grain and hash. Once again, the soundstage collapses into a flat, two dimensional image.
The Wilson engineering team began with a concept: design a loudspeaker that could work in hostile sonic environments That didn’t mean “work acceptably.” The challenge was to create a product that would produce the signature Wilson sound in those settings: a wide deep soundstage in which instruments and voices occupied discrete, three-dimensional space. Voices would sound real, tonally accurate and coherent from top to bottom. Percussion would explode from a deep, grain-free background with believable dynamics and speed.
It quickly became apparent the task would require a completely “blank slate” approach to loudspeaker design. For example: in an optimal sonic environment, a wide dispersion driver is considered a good thing. But in order to minimize diffraction, Duette needed specially designed narrow dispersion drivers.
? duette tweeter
duette group delay
In order to preserve proper Group Delay™ in a hostile environment, it meant the separate crossover, connecting cables, and driver alignments had to account for near-boundary reflections. To fine-tune Group Delay for specific listening distances and heights, an ingenious set of spikes in three sizes magnetically attach to the bottom or sides of Duette.
The range of possible applications for Duette is as broad as your imagination.
In the realm of custom home theater, Duette solves a dilemma commonly faced by dealers and designers doing "in wall" installations. Until now, the choice was to use inferior "in wall" speakers, or to try to make a high-end loudspeaker work where it was never designed to go.
The only downside to using Duette in wall? Hiding its beautiful WilsonGloss cabinet and seductive form factor.
As a secondary music system, Duette is
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