What does it sound like when you listen to a speaker that’s roughly the price of the home you put it in? The Wilson Chronosonic XVX is a $370,000 audio supertower of seven drivers stacked atop one another producing a spectrum of sound beyond the range of human hearing—literally providing more realistic detail than you could possibly hear. WIRED Luxury Gear Editor Jeremy White breaks down what that leap in price actually produces in audio quality, and the surprisingly intricate and impressive technology housed in both.Pick up your own Sonos Era 300 here https://amzn.to/3xwlpL5When you buy something through our retail links, we earn an affiliate commission.Director: Anna O'DonohueDirector of Photography: Mateo Akira NotsukeEditor: Louis LalireHost: Jeremy WhiteSenior Producer: Efrat KashaiCreative Producer: Christie GarciaLine Producer: Joe BuscemiAssociate Producer: Amy HaskourProduction Manager: Peter BrunetteCamera Operator: Sasha NovitskiySound Mixer: Tom MorleyProduction Assistant: Samuel HerbautEditorial Consultant: Chris HaslamPhotographer: Mitch PaynePost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAssistant Editor: Fynn LithgowAnimation: Sam FullerLocation: KJ West One hi-fi store, London https://www.kjwestone.co.ukWilson Audio’s UK distributor: Absolute Sounds https://www.absolutesounds.com
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TechTranscript
00:00This is coming out of the Wilson Chronosonic XVX,
00:05whereas this is coming out of the Sonos Era 300.
00:12So how does a speaker the price of a house
00:14sound different to a speaker I use at home?
00:17And why would someone spend such an insane amount of money?
00:21Let's find out.
00:23I asked Chris Haslam, Wired's audio expert,
00:26to give me some steer on what we should be listening to,
00:29and he suggested piano music.
00:31The piano is one of the most difficult instruments
00:34to reproduce in a recording.
00:48Listening to that music on the Sonos is a very pleasant experience,
00:52but listening to Clair de Lune on the Wilson speakers
00:56was an emotional experience.
01:07It wasn't just bits in that music that I haven't heard properly before,
01:11but it's the spaces in the song, the absence of sound,
01:15the weight of the keys.
01:17You can feel the difference to it.
01:19It has a physical response almost.
01:24You need a lot of detail to create this kind of rich and textured sound,
01:29and the Chronosonic uses very large, powerful components to pump this out.
01:34First thing you notice is this thing.
01:36It's huge. It's over six feet tall.
01:38Each speaker is a super tower of seven drivers stacked on top of each other.
01:42The more drivers, the more detail you can hear.
01:45Most people think these are speakers.
01:48What they're actually called are drivers.
01:51The whole thing is the speaker.
01:53The most crucial part of any speaker is the driver.
01:56This is the part of the speaker that turns audio signals into sound waves.
01:59We've got 12-inch and a 10-inch bass drivers here,
02:03a tweeter here, a high range, as the name implies,
02:07and you've got mid-range drivers either side of it, three of those there.
02:11And you've also got an upward-firing tweeter rear at the back here
02:16to give you spatial sound, as it were, or broaden out the sound.
02:19You might expect the tweeter to be at the top of the driver array,
02:22but it doesn't actually matter where it is.
02:24As long as the tweeter is pointing towards your ear level,
02:28your brain can determine much better where the higher frequencies are coming from,
02:33so they need to be directed at you.
02:36Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths with sharper curves,
02:39which makes it easier for our ears to locate them.
02:42While high frequencies are like a flashlight,
02:44low frequencies are like a glow,
02:46spreading out and making it harder to pinpoint the source.
02:49Which is why so often with subwoofers you can put them anywhere in a room,
02:53but these speakers need to be pointing at your head.
02:57Many home speakers, like the Sonos Earers,
03:00all squeeze drivers into one box or bar.
03:03What's clever about the Sonos is the amount of stuff
03:06they've managed to squeeze into this tiny package.
03:09So you've got a centre driver, two side drivers,
03:12you've got an upward-firing tweeter, and you've got two woofers,
03:15as well as a computer, amplifier,
03:18and everything you need to run this speaker within this housing.
03:22And the difference here is that these Wilson speakers are passive.
03:26They've got no power in them at all.
03:28They need to have separate amplifiers, a preamp,
03:31and enormous amounts of other equipment and huge cables just to make them work.
03:36Yes, the speakers cost $370,000,
03:40but you're going to be spending probably north of a million dollars
03:43with everything else you need to make these run.
03:46This makes the Sonos far more convenient to set up.
03:49While it's still a premium speaker for most budgets,
03:51it doesn't cover nearly as much detail or frequency range as the Wilson.
03:55When you're talking about frequency, imagine that as a rainbow spectrum.
04:01The sound rainbow coming from the Wilson is much brighter and much wider
04:06than the rainbow coming from the Sonos.
04:09This speaker can only play 41 Hz to 16 kHz,
04:15whereas this one has a frequency range of 20 Hz to 30 kHz,
04:21which is beyond the range of human hearing.
04:24It's got more detail than you can possibly hear.
04:27So what's the point? Take a cymbal crash.
04:31Humans can't hear the highest frequency of the crash,
04:34but what you can hear will sound more realistic and vibrant with a wider frequency range.
04:38It's a bit like a high-resolution camera,
04:40capturing details you might not notice but make the overall picture sharper.
04:44OK, so we're going to try going down to 20 Hz.
04:48You won't be able to hear it because it won't work on your speakers.
04:51Our microphones won't pick up something so low either, but you'll see it.
04:54Let's have a look.
04:56See how it's moving that paper?
04:58Low frequencies produce powerful sound waves with larger amplitudes.
05:02This causes physical vibrations moving lightweight objects like paper.
05:06It's quite a deep, unsettling noise which you don't want to be around for too long.
05:11If you play the same frequency, 20 Hz, on the Sonos,
05:15you can't hear a thing because it doesn't go down that low.
05:18But low frequencies can also create bad kinds of vibration.
05:21Have you ever played a low frequency through bad speakers?
05:24You'll notice a rattle and a clicking in the casing as soon as you play anything with bass.
05:29Vibration is the enemy of speakers.
05:32You only want to hear the vibrations coming from the drivers themselves.
05:36Heavy casing dampens and absorbs excess vibrations made within the driver.
05:41The bass drivers are made of a trade secret material that is so dense it can stop this distortion.
05:46It's got aerospace-grade aluminium architecture here on the side for the driver array at the top.
05:52It is very heavy and very, very solid.
05:56No vibration, but as inert as it possibly can be.
06:00So all you're hearing is the vibrations of the music and nothing else.
06:06And what's the unique selling point of these drivers?
06:09The accuracy.
06:10With tiny adjustments to the back, the music hits your ears in perfect sync.
06:15Here at the back, there is a micro-adjustment of time alignment system
06:20that is capable of adjusting the time at which the sound from these drivers
06:27hits your ears within a measurement of two millionths of a second.
06:33A tiny change that the average human ear wouldn't even be able to notice.
06:37The idea here is that Wilson wants your hearing to be the limit, not the technology.
06:42The whole point of the Chronosonic is that you need to sit in one spot in the room.
06:46That's because all the drivers are angled to hit your ears at precisely the right time.
06:50If one tiny thing goes out of kilter, even by a fraction, the illusion is destroyed.
06:55So it should sound radically different as you move around.
07:12The Wilson, you can definitely hear how the sound changes,
07:17especially when you get into the middle here,
07:19where you get into that sweet spot that the speakers are being directed towards.
07:24And when you move out of it, you can hear that the balance of everything is out of kilter.
07:29When you get in the right zone, that's when everything starts to make sense.
07:33Imagine some flashlights pointing at a painting.
07:36A slight tweak in direction and you'd still be able to enjoy the painting, just less vividly.
07:40But with the Sonos, the whole gallery is already lit.
07:43Just as you manipulate the pixels on Photoshop,
07:46Digital Signal Processing, or DSP, manipulates digital signals to enhance audio.
07:52That digital jiggery-pokery, that DSP, is working its magic.
07:56So it's creating a soundscape that is trying to be uniform no matter where you are in the room.
08:03And it actually does manage to do that to a very convincing degree,
08:07especially considering it's all coming from one unit.
08:09But you do notice, obviously, a difference in sound quality.
08:13But it's difficult to hear a change in that sound quality as you go about the room.
08:19Completely different to the Wilson.
08:21And ultimately, all the money that's gone into the Chronosonic is there to make you feel something.
08:27So having listened to these two systems side-by-side,
08:30the Sonos is an all-in-one system that's plug-and-play,
08:33and there's an enormous number of compromises here.
08:36But it's really easy and the standard is good.
08:39It's what everyone really wants if you want a hassle-free life.
08:42The Wilson speaker, it is enormously complicated to set up,
08:47unbelievably expensive to run,
08:49but the sound difference you get, the emotional response you get, is another level.
08:55But the $400,000 question is,
08:57can speakers that cost the same as a house in Colorado Springs ever be worth it?
09:03In short, if you love, and I mean love music, and you have the means,
09:08then these open up an audio world you simply never knew existed.
09:13It's like trying Japanese Kobe steak when you've spent your entire life eating In-N-Out burgers.
09:18And the price for such an experience is always going to be high,
09:22almost unbelievably high compared to the perfectly fine Sonos.
09:26But however capable Sonos is, it just plays music for you.
09:30Astonishingly, the Wilson's changed the very way you feel about sound,
09:35and that's so hard to put a price on.
09:43Sonos.com