Wilson Audio Alexandria XLF

The new KJ organisation have excellently revamped their Cavendish Street premises in keeping with the lofty aspirations of their local W1 market and combined their first event with the first showing in Europe of the Wilson Audio flagship, no overstatement this,
a tall, sculpted and finely engineered 650lb wonder box called the Alexandria XLF.
It has distant connections with the original of this series the Grand SLAMM X1 which I reviewed for Hi Fi News and thought to be a massive achievement. Much development has taken place since leading to the Alexandria models of which this is a special version of increased size to additionally provide for a certain flexibility in room matching. This relates to them near floor located bass port which may be set via alloy cover plates to either radiate forward , or from the back. Given the considerable depth of the enclosure the change in spacing to near boundaries is more than significant and offers additional flexibility in room matching.


The XLF also comes with three more alignment options via the bass damping resistor, and the mid and treble protection resistors , all of which may be fine tuned in conjunction the with angle and distance adjustment for the mid and treble assemblies to achieve best group delay at the listener location.

There was a good press turnout including Alan Sircom, Paul Messenger, Malcolm Steward, Noel Keywood, myself, Tony Bolton, Barry Fox, John Bamford, while Wilson Audio's John Giolas and Peter McGrath were on hand with Brad O'Toole of Transparent, as the cable systems used were of this brand, not to forget the welcoming Absolute Sounds Team.

The new listening room had not been fully commissioned where the mid bass trap proved a little too efficient but the new speaker did give an idea of clean and substantial peak levels complemented by an appealing transparency and resolution at low levels. Dynamics and dynamic range were two key qualities heard on this necessarily arbitrary first outing.

93.5dB/Watt, 8ohms and 500W capacity will help it go the distance.


Martin Colloms

Edited by user 27 May 2012 05:43:29(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Cross Load Firing

it does say on their website

I guess when you're in the £200k speaker league, and matching to similarly priced hifi components, then you really have got to the poiont where you'll be taking advice from the manufacturer on the ideal volume and dimensions of the room you'll build for the system in which the system will be installed. It's another world...

My friend Dave [the Sasha owner] was telling me that Wilson was offering two versions; one with the Titanium tweeter and one with a silk dome tweeter. A lively controversy is ongoing on Wilson forums over here as to which is better. I will post the relevant link when I can get it from him.

Here it is: http://www.audioaficionado.org/wilson-audio/

Another source for Wilson: YouTube - wilsonaudiospeakers's Channel

I have been unable to trace down any reference to a new Wilson tweeter so this must have been a variant of the old game where you see how information can be garbled by passing it from person to person. I would guess that the debate was either concerning the virtues of the Duetta, which uses a soft dome tweeter, vs the rest of the line; or a competing speaker line which uses soft domes vs Wilson. My bad.

Edited by user 27 May 2012 13:56:07(UTC)  | Reason: added material

Interesting I like many aspects of the Focal tweeter; I use the exotic Audiom version myself, quite a rare beast but though I am 46 can still hear above 18K for my sins and am sensitive to its character :)

Thanks for the update Stan, useful sources

I agree with paskinn; I have Spendors and GamuTs [which fit right in with the speakers named] and hear Wilsons fairly regularly. The Spendors are quite similar to the Harbeths, sharing a common BBC ancestry. I certainly don't think the Wilsons are bad speakers even though I prefer my own; the Wilson owner likes mine as well as his own. Good speakers have different sets of virtues and the choice between them will depend on the hierarchy of value each listener places on different aspects of sound reproduction. The GamuTs and Wilsons produce a very detailed "modern" sound while the Spendors produce a very natural sound excelling on voice; neither is "wrong", just different. See Robert Green's review of the current Spendor SP 1 in the May issue of Absolute Sound for a good discussion of their approach, which is far from dated. Imagine being ask who your favorite musician is; to choose one is not to reject all others. I feel it is the same here; it is a personal choice and often a very close run thing as the Duke would have said as he was choosing between Quad and Tannoy.

At the time most speakers were relatively coloured, you could have any colour you wanted and there was some sort of correlation between the colour and the kind of music you might care to listen to them on.

It drove the BBC to design their own , to address the variation and colouration and improve consistency so stable balances would be possible across their studios.

That work led to the early Spendor and Rogers equivalents, derived directly from that pioneering and very costly work.

My first experience with a non super tweeted Spendor BC1 was a revelation combining the generally low colouration and transparency of the Quad Electrostatic (1957 model) with at least plausible moving coil dynamics and bass extension.

At the time, male speech was uncannily natural,and articulate, far ahead of the hi fi branded competition. As we used to say , the lips and teeth were correctly proportioned, with no false sibilance, and correctly integrated with the formant sound.

Familiar records now exploded in the mid range with layers of fine detail and depth and convincing discrimination of subtle characterisations of small percussion instruments.

However it was never that good again as the delicate 8W rated paper voice coil former burned on hifi inputs and was replaced by something heavier and more durable, and later the delightful sounding but chemically hazardous plasticised vinyl cone surround became one of a softer and slower sounding nitrile rubber.

Perfection continues to elude us, and particular experiences can rarely be repeated.

Martin Colloms

I was actually able to do some A/B comparisons the first time I heard BC1's (Rogers, I think), as I was working at the BBC's Maida Vale studios and was able to pop into Studio One and listen to an orchestra, and then back to a studio and listen to the same thing on speakers - The Maida Vale studios had (still have?) a sort of audio ring main system, where each studio had a jackfield with all current transmissions and sometimes recordings on them, so you could plug your headphones (600 ohm of course!) or amp/speakers in to monitor. Highly impressive: I seem to remember they were some real early BC1's rather than the BBC's own derivative, but it's a long time ago now! I've still got a pair of "BC1/3" speakers - BC1 with the STC super-tweeter.