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Last week I spent in NYC and while Amy was hanging along some kind of malignancy conference of her and had a couple hours free around Grand Center Station and I decided to drop by at  Innovative Audio at 58 street.  I know that they Wilson and Lamm dealers, so it might be interesting to hear ML3 with large Wilson.

Sine I am not in business of buying anything I did not make any reservation and when I drop by in their office I did not ask to make any changes and to play everything as it was - I do not want to waste the people time trying to sell me something.

The first room was Wilson Alexandria XLF I think. It was the room kind of dedicated to the XLF, their flagman room. The front end was all Spectral, the application was VTL’s Siegfried Reference, plus some kind of fat cables. I presume it was Transparent as they run Transparent power treatment devise, I have no idea what it was. The sales guys was very little informed what they do but they were very polite, courteous and willing to help, so was I. The souse was Meridian DAW, the ripped CDs.

Sound. That was interesting. Something was very severally compromised in there across the board and it was clearly at the very beginning. I do not Meridian sound but I did have a feeling that the CD souse was not good. Sound had that " washy burned not crisp" feeling that I might under attribute to ether very bad digital front end or to bad electricity. I did asked the guys in there if they feel that they lose any quality or obtain any problems while they rip the CD to the Meridian server. They said that they do not and that the ripped CD sound much better then original. I accepted the answer and did not argue.

With exception of the across the board "washy" sound it was impossible do not notice that Alexandria XLF, even despite the inferior electronics ( a pair of Lamm's M1 was sitting right there and I have no idea why they did not use them), did offer something remarkable. The innermodulative XLF handling, the  ability to portrayal complex lo level lower MF signals why handling stressful upper MF was truly tour de force of loudspeaker capacity in my view. How David is getting this from his largest Wilsons and how he get some much dynamics from his largest Wilsons is a huge secret to me but he does it and to my knowledge no others can do it. Neither the smaller Wilsons can do it, including the Maxx. The largest Wilsons are kind of mystery to me and they in a way define what might be done by loudspeakers.  

Even it was kind of target listening but it was nice pleasurable listening experience.  The music they have on the  Meridian server was mostly the Audiophile crap, the electronics was stone-cold, there was no nuances take care in that setup but the sound was better than I anticipated, at least what XLF did very well was not able to be hidden by what was wrong in that room and with that setup.

Now, if I way that sound was pleasurable and better then I expected then does it mean that sound was acceptable.  No it was not.  The was very constant ever-present pressure from Wilsons, that in the end made me not able to listen too long. Interesting that it was despite that I feel that it was "pleasurable". I do think that the pleasure I got from  some brilliant aspects of  large Wilsons, and   those good thing was truly hypnotizing. The overall pervasive present of VERY characteristic Wilsons bass however made the whole experience kind of strange.  It is like walking around street and to see a hundred dollar bill laying on the grass. Looks attractive, does it? How pretend that this hundred dollar bill that so attractively sitting on the ground and waiting for you is coved in shit, will you pick it up? That was exactly what Wilsons demonstrated and in this case the preverbal shit was played by Wilson's lower octave. It was not juts "boomy" uncontrolled bass that was improperly managed by the room. It was uncontrolled bass but I am not taking about the wrong amount of bass but the texture of the bass itself. It was very bad and it was in particularly bad in context of generally superb lover MF region. I just do not know what to say more: it was just a generic LF noise coming at the bottom and it hugely poisoned anything.

I asks if I can listen another room where Lamms was connected as I do know the amp well. It was Wilson Saha or something like this - 3 ways Wilson slightly larger than Wilson 7. Here sound was absolute crap and it was waste of time to listen it.

In the end the owner of the shot come to the room - a very pleasant fellow. He begin to talk about music, not that he had any interest but it feels that he rather pushing from himself the "pseudo - intellectual musical verbiage" that he feels his customer shall like. I honestly was listening him and had no idea what he was taking. I did ask him a few questions in context of what he said and he kind of behaved like a deer in headlights. Do not get me wrong - I have nothing against the guy, I just wish if so much desperate to impress visitors with his fine artistic capacity then instead of speeding sophomoric verbiage about music and listening experience he would need to make sure that his store have at least one interesting or worthy musical performance.

As I was leaving the store owner asked me what I was thinking about Wilson sound. I said that I did not like bass. He looked at me as I was unfortunate "Cripple of Inishmaan" but he did demonstrated his own class and did not disagree with me.

Generally it was a very nice trip and generally Largest Wilsons just reassured me  that they are the very best what might be taken from single box topology with port. They are for sure a leading age of today loudspeakers  thinking, if you think inside of the box.

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