Stereophile - Sabrina 5

I had one of the old OG Wamms long time ago, bought used, sold used, made some cash in the process, nothing about it had any great appeal to me (even when i wasn't a very nitpicky guy back in the days), but, that's old news.

I had the OG TAD Reference for 16 or 17 years...so my standards, demands and nitpickiness get proportionally higher, if the price is high.. In hind sight, i shouldn't have sold it and have had Andrew cook me a upgrade kit as the years went by..., but, i've rather have eggs in different baskets..

Having said that, I investigated the Alexx V a bit deeper in recent times.  A guy i know has a pair. Usually, they are tricked out (carried by/confounded by) with certain types of creme de la creme front end electronics. I took one of my amps and front end combo  that has no real flavor of its own to discern what the Alexx V on its own is capable of....hefty amp however to deal with the lousy load that a Wilson is...

- Fatigue, can't get over the fatigue after a bit....

- Anyone calling magicos sterile and a Alexx V a juicy orange (relatively speaking)? you're so full of it again...

- Best put your head in a vise, also the case with some others, excusable

- No real depthwise spatial nuance like a TAD Ref....The Wilson's more of a flat wall smashing you in...I would also compare it to the last rev b&w 801 d4, which is less than half of that Wilson's price. The B&W is a bit of a trip...almost feels like you turned atmos on or something with a stereo pair....the expensive borresens also come to mind,..... but nada none of that from Alexx V

Let's move on from the audiophile mumbo jumbo and examine if it has anything special, any subtle appeal for a instrument specialist type of guy....For example, i have a speaker that got done up by ted jensen, another one tuned by yamaha's musical instruments guys, etc.....Nothing nada from Alexx V....Anyways, i suppose it has some appeal for the under-initiated. For the high end rung and in consideration of some competition, it's just a plain Mary actually, IME, can't be a reference anything.

Pay a magazine something and he'll sing some prose about everything...(to be fair, the magazine guy has to pay his bills and eat dinner too, a chicken dinner would be good). A few are clever enough to let you read between the lines somedays though.

Not sure what all the fuss is about. No one said they were the holy grail. I don’t own Wilson’s but have seriously considered the Sabrina X in the past and have heard them with different electronics and thought they sounded great (amazing full/tight bass response for the size) and I did not think they were over priced. They have the same tweeter as the WAMM, so nice trickle down.

@mdalton wrote:

... He indicated his view that Wilsons tip up the upper frequencies, which can sound very appealing to those of us (most of us,lol!) with some hearing loss.  Those frequency response curves do give some credence to that view.

That would explain or substantiate my auditioning of the Sabrina's (SabrinaX) at a friend's place about a year ago, where I definitely felt they were hot sounding/tipped up in the upper frequencies. 

@mdalton - while age related hearing loss does manifest itself in the high treble - say above 14K, the most problematic and very common manifestation of hearing loss is in the 2-6KHz region - so if Wilson was driven by demographics they would be boosting that region, not cutting it. Wilson speaker are very revealing of what comes before them, so a lot of criticism of the speakers being bright is a case of shoot the messenger.

@audphile1 

"This place is turning into some sad circus."

Turning?!

@yoyoyaya 

Betweennthe ages of 40 and 65, on average even men don’t have much hearing loss below 4k, but we do experience some above 4k.  But you’re right, after 65 or 70, again on avg, we start to experience fairly significant loss below 4k (tho again, the curve is much steeper above 4k.  Regardless, Ivwas just trying to posit snvexplanation that reconciles the measurements, including a very significant dip between 2k and 4k, with what many of us hear when we listen to Wilson’s.