I'd begun my auditioning of the original Alexias with David Wilson's own recording of Beethoven's Violin Sonata 10 in G, Op.96, performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg (24-bit/192kHz needle drop from LP, Wilson Audio W-8315). I wrote that, through the Alexias, "the balance of the instruments was intimate yet unforced. They were reproduced with faithful tone colors—I heard no colorations—and the imaging was such that the musicians seemed to be in my room." My reaction to this recording through the Alexia 2s was the same.
As the sonata drew to a close, Roon suggested another David Wilson recording of David Abel and Julie Steinberg, this time playing Brahms's Sonata 1 in G, Op.78 (24/176.4 AIFF file, Wilson W-8722). This passionately lyrical sonata has been a favorite of mine for decades, and the versions in my library range from Anne-Sophie Mutter's 1982 recording with Alexis Weissenberg (CD, EMI CDC 7 49299 2) to my most recent purchase, Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt's superbly idiomatic performance (DSD128 files, Ondine ODE1284-2D/HDtracks), with stops along the way at Arturo Delmoni's recording, with pianist Yuri Funahashi (ALAC ripped from CD, John Marks JMR 2), and my own unreleased recording from the 1996 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, with Ani Kavafian accompanied by Max Levinson (16/44.1, 192kbps MP3).
Not only did the Wilson speakers not editorialize on the tonal colors on these very different recordings, they clearly revealed the different recorded perspectives: the mellow-toned Wilson; the rather scratchy-sounding Mutter; the rich-toned Steinway on my own recording, with less-well-defined stereo imaging than the Wilson; Delmoni's dry-sounding, rather careful performance, but with better-defined stereo than the Kavafian; the superbly stable stereo imaging of the Tetzlaff, though with a more distant perspective than the Delmoni. Images weren't bloated. Everything that had been captured on each recording was reproduced at the appropriate scale.
The weight given the piano in the Tetzlaff and Kavafian recordings led me to play our February 2018 "Recording of the Month," Chopin's Last Waltz, performed by pianist Robert Silverman (IsoMike 5606). Robert Baird's review had been of the LP; I purchased the DSD128 files from NativeDSD.com. Solo piano is always difficult for speakers to reproduce correctly, because piano notes have high levels of energy in the region where speakers tend to have resonances of various kinds, and because the nature of the music often doesn't mask those resonances once they've been excited. Nevertheless, Chopin's Ballade 4 in f, performed by Silverman on what sounds like a well-prepared Steinway grand, was reproduced without coloration in the midrange, and with a suitable degree of majesty in the low frequencies. Even so, the Alexia 2 still suffered from a slight emphasis on some notes on my "torture" recording of solo piano: Andras Schiff playing a Haydn keyboard sonata on Encores After Beethoven (16/44.1 AIFF, ECM New Series 1950).
But what about larger-scale music? Although my longtime reference speakers are relatively small two-way stand-mounts, I don't often play symphonic music through them; although they faithfully reproduce the sounds of the instruments, and excel at throwing a stable and tangible stereo image, what they don't get right is the music's scale. This disparity was thrown into sharp relief during a visit to Michael Fremer a few years back, when I listened to a familiar orchestral recording through his huge Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers. When I got home, I played the same recording through my KEF LS50s. As much as I love the little KEFs, it sounded as if a toy orchestra were playing in the room.
A favorite performance of Beethoven's Symphony 7, bought after reading Larry Greenhill's mention of it in a review of a Tannoy subwoofer in February 2016, is by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (24/96 ALAC files, SFS Media). The minute I heard the big chords at the beginning of the first movement through the Alexia 2s, I felt I could turn up the volume—and then turn it up some more—without there being any sense of strain. It was like sitting in Row C of the concert hall, so alive was the sound of the orchestra through these speakers. Though the image wasn't as deep as I was expecting, this was probably due more to the recording than to the Wilsons—through them, my own recordings have as much depth as I know I had captured, and that they contain.
"Daddy, what are you listening to? Why are you playing Justin Bieber?"
It was my daughter Emily, drawn down to the listening room by the bass notes shaking the house's upper stories. With the Wilsons' ability to play loud without distress, I was playing a track recommended by On a Higher Note's Philip O'Hanlon as loud as I wanted: The SPL at the listening position, measured with Studio Six Digital's SPL Meter app set to Slow on my iPhone 6S, peaked at 102.5dB(C). Because of the Alexia's high sensitivity, the RMS levels at the speaker terminals were around 10V, well within the capability of my Lamm monoblocks.
"It's actually Will.i.am's "#thatpower," I explained, "though yes, it does feature Justin Bieber."
"Don't play it—you're too old!"
I kept playing the track (16/44.1 FLAC MQA, Interscope), turning up the volume a tad to make the point: As hard as it might be for David and Daryl Wilson to appreciate (but not, perhaps, Peter McGrath, whom I've witnessed rocking out to James Blake's James Blake), and as well as the Alexia 2s reproduced classical chamber and orchestral music, they were also made to play such limited-dynamic-range recordings as "#thatpower," with its vast levels of dropped bass and punchy drum samples, without strain or fatigue. They kept it clean while they kept it loud.
Conclusions
How did Wilson's Alexia 2 compare with the original Alexia? Five years is too long to be sure of one's aural memory. Heck, under some circumstances, five minutes is too long! What I can say is that I very much enjoyed the three months the Alexia 2s spent in my home.
I can also say that Wilson Audio speakers can provoke polarized responses. I was at a dinner a couple of years back with several other audio writers. "I don't get it," one of them said to me. "How could you recommend the Wilson Alexia, when just over a year later you favorably reviewed the Vivid Giya G3? You're an engineer—you must agree that the Vivid and the Wilson are as different as it is possible for two speakers to be. How can they both be rated Class A in Stereophile's 'Recommended Components'?"
Yes, I'm an engineer, but I don't mistake the road for the destination. Designers can and do take many roads, but their ultimate destination is the same: to allow listeners to be transported by their music to that place where worldly cares cease to exist. And that the Alexia Series 2 did to perfection—without smoothing over the recordings' imperfections, without bowdlerizing the meanings of the music. I can't pretend that the life of a magazine editor is not stressful—I knew it was going into it. But evening after evening, after taking the subway home from the office, I cracked open a beer—Dale's Pale Ale, or New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale, or Firestone-Walker Union Jack IPA, or Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA, or even Raging Bitch Belgian-style IPA from Flying Dog Brewery (footnote 1)—settled back in my listening chair, fired up my iPad, set the Roon app to its random-play Radio function, and let the Wilson Alexia Series 2s take me far, far away. That is what great speakers do.
Footnote 1: Blame my English son-in-law, Joe, for introducing me to Raging Bitch. It is the wonder of the craft-beer age that, here in Brooklyn, all of these great brews are stocked by our local corner grocery store.
Not only did the Wilson speakers not editorialize on the tonal colors on these very different recordings, they clearly revealed the different recorded perspectives: the mellow-toned Wilson; the rather scratchy-sounding Mutter; the rich-toned Steinway on my own recording, with less-well-defined stereo imaging than the Wilson; Delmoni's dry-sounding, rather careful performance, but with better-defined stereo than the Kavafian; the superbly stable stereo imaging of the Tetzlaff, though with a more distant perspective than the Delmoni. Images weren't bloated. Everything that had been captured on each recording was reproduced at the appropriate scale.
I kept playing the track (16/44.1 FLAC MQA, Interscope), turning up the volume a tad to make the point: As hard as it might be for David and Daryl Wilson to appreciate (but not, perhaps, Peter McGrath, whom I've witnessed rocking out to James Blake's James Blake), and as well as the Alexia 2s reproduced classical chamber and orchestral music, they were also made to play such limited-dynamic-range recordings as "#thatpower," with its vast levels of dropped bass and punchy drum samples, without strain or fatigue. They kept it clean while they kept it loud.
ConclusionsHow did Wilson's Alexia 2 compare with the original Alexia? Five years is too long to be sure of one's aural memory. Heck, under some circumstances, five minutes is too long! What I can say is that I very much enjoyed the three months the Alexia 2s spent in my home.
Footnote 1: Blame my English son-in-law, Joe, for introducing me to Raging Bitch. It is the wonder of the craft-beer age that, here in Brooklyn, all of these great brews are stocked by our local corner grocery store.
