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

@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.  

EPDR

This keeps getting mentioned so I thought I could clarify it a little. 

EPDR is often discussed as a way to improve our understanding of the interaction between an amplifier’s output impedance and the speaker load.   The idea is that EPDR tells us something about the current and voltage at the speaker terminals that would result from this speaker being attached to any amplifier. 

Unfortunately this is NOT the case.  EPDR is about heat at a linear amplifier’s output transistors.  "Peak Dissipation" here means at the output transistors, or heat sinks.   In particular, if you care about EPDR, then use a Class D amp, cause EPDR does not apply at all.  It also has nothing to do with an amplifier's output impedance or current limits, at least how you think they would, and even Stereophile's original articles don't make this claim.  They just sort of let you feel they do. 

I wrote about this in a great deal of depth here. 

Obviously, nothing good about overheating your amplifier, but I would be much more concerned, if not curious, as to how Wilson can get an 8 or 4 Ohm woofer to go all the way down to 2 Ohms. That’s quite an impressive feature.  laugh

That was a great review.as in quantum physics there are some elements formulas,theories still under debate. This is why I buy amplifiers with alot of headroom > 1kw and drop down to 1 ohm stability with high dampening factor.big transformers and lots of capicitors.  I love the furman 20 I because of the lift and surge protection and large capicitors for discharge during transients in the amp  is also believe in large gauge speaker wire to reduce resistance 7 awg or larger to minimize resistance. What does this have to do with wilson? I knew him and raced with him on Miller motor sports track.he was kind,generous,concerned and listened and answered my questions. I miss him alot and wished I had gleaned more  knowledge from him. Even though my wilson maxx can be driven with a low wattage amp it is when you step on the gas with a high kw amp they come alive.long live audiophile and engineers as I enjoy the fruits of thier labors.

Huh? Impressive?..0.95 ohm epdr ......wonder what godawful crap it was with the Alexx V. All that to eek some extra useless bass out of it... 

Here's where the common sense goes missing for the audiophile...Perhaps he thinks he's floating around in Valhalla without a room to deal with....

You walk around in front of a Alexx V and the bass was in some other spot in the room ....way outside of your audiophile triangle sweet spot for imaging wonders or whatever. Hence, still need some subwoofers for the room anyways, no matter what bass you eeked out of that Wilson or not...same goes for anything claiming to be full range

(that extra eeked out for bass, lousy load for naught)

Is a Gryphon monster amp a fidelity king, you thought? Hell no, it isn't. It all comes with a fidelity compromise dude...Those 2 hernias from lifting it for naught again...Any monster amp still sounds worse with a lousy load like that (whether it survives the load or not).

 

Obviously, nothing good about overheating your amplifier, but I would be much more concerned, if not curious, as to how Wilson can get an 8 or 4 Ohm woofer to go all the way down to 2 Ohms. That’s quite an impressive feature.  laugh