• bet365娱乐, bet365体育赛事, bet365投注入口, bet365亚洲, bet365在线登录, bet365专家推荐, bet365开户

    WIRED
    Search
    Search

    What Speakers That Cost $370,000 Sound Like

    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/3xwlpL5

    When you buy something through our retail links, we earn an affiliate commission.

    Director: Anna O'Donohue
    Director of Photography: Mateo Akira Notsuke
    Editor: Louis Lalire
    Host: Jeremy White
    Senior Producer: Efrat Kashai
    Creative Producer: Christie Garcia
    Line Producer: Joe Buscemi
    Associate Producer: Amy Haskour
    Production Manager: Peter Brunette
    Camera Operator: Sasha Novitskiy
    Sound Mixer: Tom Morley
    Production Assistant: Samuel Herbaut
    Editorial Consultant: Chris Haslam
    Photographer: Mitch Payne
    Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
    Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
    Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
    Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
    Animation: Sam Fuller
    locations: KJ West One hi-fi store, London https://www.kjwestone.co.uk
    Wilson Audio’s UK distributor: Absolute Sounds https://www.absolutesounds.com

    Released on 07/09/2024

    Transcript

    This...

    [dramatic music]

    Is coming out of the Wilson Chronosonic XVX.

    Whereas this...

    [dramatic music]

    Is coming outta the Sonos Era 300.

    So how does a speaker,

    the price of a house sound different

    to a speaker I use at home?

    And why would someone spend such an insane amount of money?

    Let's find out.

    I asked Chris Haslam Wired's audio expert

    to give me some steer on what we should be listening to,

    and he suggested piano music.

    The piano is one of the most difficult instruments

    to reproduce in a recording.

    [mellow piano music]

    Listening to that music on the Sonos

    is a very pleasant experience.

    But listening to Clair de Lune on the Wilson Speakers

    was an emotional experience.

    [dramatic piano music]

    It wasn't just bits in that music

    that I haven't heard properly before,

    but it's the spaces in the song, the absence of sound,

    the weight of the keys, you can feel the difference to it,

    it has a physical response almost.

    [dramatic piano music]

    You need a lot of detail to create this kind of

    rich and textured sound.

    And the Chronosonic uses very large,

    powerful components to pump this out.

    First thing you notice is this thing.

    It's huge.

    It's over six feet tall.

    Each speaker is a super tower

    of seven drivers stacked on top of each other.

    The more drivers, the more detail you can hear.

    Most people think these are speakers,

    what they're actually called a drivers.

    The whole thing is the speaker.

    The most crucial part of any speaker is the driver.

    This is the part of the speaker

    that turns audio signals into sound waves.

    We've got 12 inch and a 10 inch base drivers here,

    a tweeter here,

    the high range as the name implies,

    and you've got mid-range drivers,

    either side of it, three of those there.

    And you've also got a upward firing tweeter

    rear at the back here

    to give you sort of spatial sound as it were,

    or broaden out the sound.

    You might expect the tweeter to be

    at the top of the driver array,

    but it doesn't actually matter where it is.

    As long as the tweeter is pointing towards a rear level,

    your brain can determine much better

    where the higher frequencies are coming from.

    So they need to be directed at you.

    Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths

    with sharper curves,

    which makes it easier for our ears to locate them.

    While high frequencies are like a flashlight,

    low frequencies are like a glow

    spreading out and making it harder to pinpoint the source,

    which is why so often with subwoofers

    you can put them anywhere in a room,

    but these speakers need to be pointing at your head.

    Many home speakers, like the Sonos Eras,

    all squeeze drivers into one box or bar.

    What's clever about the Sonos

    is the amount of stuff they've managed to squeeze

    into this tiny package.

    So you've got a center driver, two side drivers,

    you've got a upward firing tweeter

    and you've got two woofers,

    as well as a computer amplifier

    and everything you need to run this speaker

    within this housing.

    And the difference here is that

    these Wilson speakers are passive.

    They've got no power in them at all.

    They need to have separate amplifiers,

    a preamp and enormous amounts of other equipment

    and huge cables just to make them work.

    Yes, the speakers cost $370,000,

    but you're gonna be spending probably

    north of a million dollars with everything else

    you need to make these run.

    This makes the Sonos far more convenient to set up.

    While it's still a premium speaker for most budgets,

    it doesn't cover nearly as much detail

    or frequency range as the Wilson.

    When you're talking about frequency,

    imagine that as a rainbow spectrum.

    The sound rainbow coming from the Wilson

    is much brighter and much wider

    than the rainbow coming from the Sonos.

    This speaker can only play 41 hertz to 16 kilohertz,

    whereas this one has a frequency range

    of 20 hertz to 30 kilohertz,

    which is beyond the range of human hearing.

    It's got more detail than you can possibly hear.

    So what's the point?

    Take a cymbal crash.

    Humans can't hear the highest frequency of the crash,

    but what you can hear will sound more realistic

    and vibrant with a wider frequency range.

    It's a bit like a high resolution camera

    capturing details you might not notice

    but made the overall picture sharper.

    Okay, so we're gonna try going down to 20 hertz.

    You won't be able to hear it

    because it won't work on your speakers.

    Our microphoness won't pick up something so low either,

    but you'll see it.

    Let's have a look.

    See how it's moving that paper.

    Low frequencies produce powerful sound waves

    with larger amplitudes.

    This causes physical vibrations

    moving lightweight objects like paper.

    It's quite a deep unsettling noise,

    which you don't want to be around for too long.

    If you play the same frequency, 20 hertz on the Sonos,

    you can't hear a thing because it doesn't go down that low.

    But low frequencies can also create bad kinds of vibration.

    Have you ever played a low frequency through bad speakers?

    You'll notice a rattle

    and a clicking in the casing

    as soon as you play anything with bass.

    Vibration is the enemy of speakers.

    You only want to hear the vibrations

    coming from the drivers themselves.

    Heavy casing dampens and absorbs excess vibrations

    made within the driver.

    The base drivers are made of a trade secret material

    that is so dense it can stop this distortion.

    Got aerospace grade aluminum architecture

    here on the side for the driver array at the top.

    It is very heavy and very, very solid.

    No vibration and as inert as it possibly can be.

    So all you are hearing is the vibrations of the music

    and nothing else.

    And what's the unique selling point of these drivers?

    The accuracy.

    With tiny adjustments to the back,

    the music hits your ears in perfect sync.

    Here at the back,

    there is a micro adjustment of time alignment system

    that is capable of adjusting the time

    at which the sound from these drivers

    hits your ears within a measurement

    of two millionths of a second.

    A tiny change that the average human ear

    wouldn't even be able to notice.

    The idea here is that Wilson wants your hearing

    to be the limit, not the technology.

    The whole point of the Chronosonic

    is that you need to sit in one spot in the room.

    That's because all the drivers are angled

    to hit your ears at precisely the right time.

    If one tiny thing goes out of kilter, even by a fraction,

    the illusion is destroyed.

    So it should sound radically different as you move around.

    [dramatic piano music]

    The Wilsons, you can definitely hear how the sound changes,

    especially when you get into the middle here,

    where you get into that sweet spot

    that the speakers are being directed towards.

    And when you move out of it,

    you can hear that the balance of everything

    is out of kilter.

    When you get in the right zone,

    that's when everything starts to make sense.

    Imagine some flashlights pointing at a painting,

    a slight tweak in direction,

    and you'd still be able to enjoy the painting

    just less vividly.

    But with the Sonos, the whole gallery is already lit.

    Just as you manipulate the pixels on Photoshop,

    digital signal processing or DSP,

    manipulates digital signals to enhance audio.

    That digital jiggery pokery,

    that DSP is working its magic.

    So it's creating a soundscape

    that is trying to be uniform

    no matter where you are in the room.

    And it actually does manage to do that

    to a very convincing degree,

    especially considering it's all coming from one unit.

    But you do notice obviously a difference in sound quality,

    but it's difficult to hear a change in that sound quality

    as you go about the room.

    Completely different to the Wilson.

    And ultimately all the money

    that's gone into the Chronosonic

    is there to make you feel something.

    So having listened to these two systems side by side,

    the Sonos is an all in one system that's plug and play

    and there's an enormous number of compromises here,

    but it's really easy and the standard is good.

    It's what everyone really wants

    if you want an hassle-free life.

    The Wilson speaker,

    it is enormously complicated to set up,

    unbelievably expensive to run,

    but the sound difference you get,

    the emotional response you get is another level.

    But the $400,000 question is can speakers

    that cost the same as a house in Colorado Springs

    ever be worth it?

    In short, if you love and I mean love music

    and you have the means,

    then these open up an audio world

    you simply never knew existed.

    It's like trying Japanese Kobe steak

    when you've spent your entire life

    eating In-N-Out burgers.

    And the price for such an experience

    is always going to be high,

    almost unbelievably high

    compared to the perfectly fine Sonos,

    but however capable Sonos is, it just plays music for you.

    Astonishingly, the Wilsons change the very way you feel

    about sound and that's so hard to put a price on.

    [dramatic music]

    bet365娱乐