Stereophile - Sabrina 5


Hate to rag on Sterophile again, but one of two things are true.  One, the Sabrina speakers they reviewed were wired incorrectly or Wilson is now shipping with inverted midranges. 

All that work to reduce distortion to vanishing levels only to totally ahem, add custom flavor to the frequency response.  

Honestly if I was reviewing this speaker I'd have stopped to reach out to them before publishing, just to be sure this speaker shipped as intended. 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/wilson-audio-specialties-sabrina-v-loudspeaker-measurements

erik_squires

@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.

@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.