Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of afternoons listening to a system built around the late David Wilson’s magnum opus, the Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker ($685,000/pair), which Jason Victor Serinus reported on in December 2016. In addition to the joy of simply listening to music on such exotic speakers, the experience provided insight into just how well the Master Chronosonics would work in a relatively normal-sized listening room—in this case, one measuring 21.5 feet long by a little over 18 feet wide, with a ceiling height of a little over 9.5 feet: not small in an absolute sense, but a lot smaller than the sort of space usually associated with speakers this large.
When I say the room is of relatively normal size, I do not mean it’s normal:
One doesn’t simply shove aside the pool table and plop down a pair of WAMMs in the basement rec room. Although it started out as a regular room in a regular house, this listening room was designed by noted acoustical engineer Bob Hodas (Skywalker Ranch, Abbey Road Studios, footnote 1), who began by closing off an adjoining space and replacing the doors with acoustic doors. Hodas replaced the original walls with ones made from two layers of 5/8″ sheetrock, with a Quiet Rock double-panel material between them. Hodas designed the room when the system had smaller, less complex speakers, but he wasn’t at all concerned about switching to the Master Chronosonics. “It’s been my experience that if a room is well-designed, most any speakers will work well in it,” he told me.
The system relies exclusively on digital sources. Some of the recordings I heard were streamed, but the majority were files that had been downloaded from content providers or ripped from CDs. (An aside: my host felt that “MQA done right” was the best-sounding of the available formats, although he was quick to add that “all are good…how well the different versions were done matters more than which format was used.”) In addition to the Wilson WAMM Master Chronosonics, the system—assembled by retailer Music Lovers Audio of Berkeley—included two Wilson Audio WAMM Subsonic subwoofers; two Wilson Audio WAMM Subwoofer Controllers; two Spectral DMA-500 monoblocks for the WAMM towers; two Ayre MX-R Twenty monoblocks for the subwoofers; a Spectral DMC-30SV preamp; a dCS Vivaldi Upsampler, DAC, and Clock; a Roon Nucleus server; and top-of-the-line cables from Transparent and Spectral/MIT.
Although the room wasn’t small, its dimensions required a more compact than usual system layout for the Master Chronosonics: The centers of the towers’ front baffles were 5 feet out from the front wall, a little over 4 feet in from the side walls, and roughly 9.5 feet apart. The listening position was 16 feet out from the front wall (or 5 feet out from the back wall). Those dimensions brought to mind a few questions: Would the output from the widely spaced multiple drivers be integrated at so close a listening position? Would I be listening to small, intimate performances with 10-foot–tall vocalists and violins? Could frequency-response anomalies be avoided with the walls that close to the speakers? And, most obvious of all: Would the 3600–cubic-foot space be overdriven by the volume of air moved by the WAMMs?
My original plan, to the extent that I had one, was to listen to music that spanned a wide range of styles but was chosen to systematically address these sorts of questions. That plan lasted until about 30 seconds into the first song, by which time I’d been completely sucked in by the music. As it turned out though, the time I spent with the Master Chronosonics answered all my questions and more. For example, one of the first performances I listened to was “The Snow Maiden,” from Reference Recordings’ Exotic Dances from the Opera—and right away I had an answer to my first question: Yes, as impossible as the visual cues made it seem, the WAMMs disappeared completely and took the listening-room walls with them. That level of performance suggested that the signals from the multiple drivers were indeed being integrated at the listening position, with precise timing and phase alignment.
Later, I listened to a couple of recordings of more intimate performances and venues. The first was “Cuando Silba el Viento” from Sera Una Noche’s second album, La Segunda. The WAMMs did an outstanding job decoding the odd but very specific spatial relationships between the performers and recording space, and beautifully recreated the rich inner detail and complex harmonic structure that make Lidia Borda’s vocals so compelling. The second was Rickie Lee Jones’s “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking,” from Pirates. One thing that struck me was the temporal precision of the beginnings and ends of notes. Another was the appearance of sharply defined, crystal-clear spaces between even the most closely spaced performers. I hate to invoke a cliché, but I know this record very, very well—yet I was hearing more background vocalists in that recording studio than I had ever before.
The next thing I listened to was a performance at the opposite end of the musical spectrum, the Saint Saëns Symphony No.3 in c, with Olivier Larry playing the spectacular Fred J. Cooper Memorial organ, and with Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. The piece began, I raised the volume to the right level, and the WAMMs did exactly what they were supposed to: They effortlessly recreated every aspect of the performance, including the organ, with a scale and power far beyond anything I’d ever heard from an audio system. It would be pointless hyperbole, and thus demeaning to the speakers, to claim they actually reproduced the output and scale of an organ with nearly 7000 pipes and 32-foot stops—nothing can do that, other than an organ with nearly 7000 pipes and 32-foot stops. What the WAMM Master Chronosonics did was a stunningly good job of evoking such an instrument—a far, far better job than I’ve heard from even the largest of their would-be competitors.
I have to admit that the Master Chronosonic/WAMM Subsonic system’s bass performance was a surprise. I expected power, impact, articulation…you name it. But nothing could have prepared me for the organ’s output at 16Hz. To think: I had wondered whether the room would support true low bass, and, if so, whether that bass response would be spectacularly uneven. The answers were Yes and No, respectively, and I’m still not sure how that trick was pulled off.
In his own report, Jason Victor Serinus noted that production of the Master Chronosonic would be limited to 70 sets, so I feel very fortunate to have had an opportunity to spend time listening to a system built around one of those—in Carmen Red finish, no less!—and doubly so in that I was able to do so in a normal-sized room. I’ll admit that I’d been skeptical about the Master Chronosonics’ ability to work very well in such a space. Yet song by song, and hour by hour, my questions were answered, my doubts put to rest: The Wilsons worked very, very well. I heard nothing to suggest their performance had been compromised to accommodate the room’s size, or anything that suggested their performance was being degraded by the room itself. They displayed all the virtues I associate with Wilson speakers, and at a level commensurate with the role they fill at the top of the company’s line.
Footnote 1: Bob Hodas Acoustic Analysis, Orinda, CA. Web: www.bobhodas.com.
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