Wilsons new flagship

I was at the THE show in LA yesterday ( which BTW was a BIG let down). Anyhow, i had a very interesting conversation that relates to this thread with a knowledgable and nice manufacturer there. Essentially, he was telling me that pricing high end gear is a very tricky thing, because if he was to price his new top level gear at a number that most would consider as reasonable ( say below $10K) he would then create an impression with some ’cork sniffers’ that this gear was not that good! OTOH, if he prices the gear at a price that is in the stratosphere, he creates demand and an impression among the same cork sniffers that the gear is what he says it is..the best he can deliver. This sales psychology is unfortunately prevalent in the hobby for two reasons I believe, one is what he says, and two because there are some folk to whom the price can never be too high!  These folks are simply buying by price...nothing more. ( many times it is their rep who does the buying, the actual buyer has nothing to do with buying anything). 

For the manufacturer it is simply easier to sell just a few at huge mark-up than many at small mark-ups. Particularly if one is a small endeavor with limited supply capacity, which almost all of these folks are.

@ghdprentice wrote:

I'd also like to point out among the general public spending $10K on a set of speakers would receive all the criticism the Wilson does.

The general, non-audiophile public is irrelevant in this context. You mean to imply the potential buyer for the Wilson Audio flagship speakers is in a different category of audiophile altogether? He just has more money, that's it.  

Many peoples perspective here comes from their own net worth. I'm just guessing the average net worth of the folks here is not over $50M. If it were, I suspect the criticism would go away.

Not everything applies to the slide rule thinking that audiophiles want the same if given the same or more or less unlimited amount of money. Where your rationale is now well known as "you get what you pay for"-approach as a rather strict calculus where every product within a category ranks according to its price (all the way into the stratospheric), to me at least price has a big fat "it depends" written all over it that topples over any attempt to come up with a similar conclusion to yours.

It's not that price is irrelevant, but it's what you can do within a price range with different design approaches and product segments that breaks up the rule the hifi industry at large would love to impose on us: that the name of the game is to spend ever more (insane amounts of) money within a specific genre of home audio components to get closer to sonic bliss - i.e.: that more money spent always sounds better or has the potential to sound better vs. less money.  

Why get to where one would defend the price of the Wilson Audio "Autobiography" speakers (a bombastic naming if ever there was one) or other extremely highly priced hifi gear? Their business is their business, not ours, and more audiophiles should take not of that and untangle themselves from being the willing disciples/useful idiots and an extension of the audio business that sets the prices of their products as they see fit and which has spun way out of control. 

@whart wrote:

The Wilson is "a statement of the art" from one school. But there are many other approaches, which date back to before WW II and are still actively pursued today with components that require one to assemble and voice a system, typically horn-based with low-powered tube gear—truly a different world.

This is a parallel universe--often referred to as the "underground" that is made up of equipment that people today would likely call "DIY" but which occupies a place that is just as revelatory but is not part of the commercial eco-system that provides the churn for the legacy press. 

+1

There is no "improvement" above a certain point....There are "differences", one can keep changing up what they have above a certain point.

I have seen 1 hifi equipment designer (Angela Yeung) ever state this truth in the public space.

https://youtu.be/zaXMU-zRq_c?is=VBbTQvnb6iGtWCmK

If Willie priced his next speaker at 2 million, he will claim it is an "improvement" to his current 780k + 110k paint job speaker (his R&D got even more serious by then, wink wink)..

Where your rationale is now well known as "you get what you pay for"-approach as a rather strict calculus where every product within a category ranks according to its price (all the way into the stratospheric), to me at least price has a big fat "it depends" written all over it that topples over any attempt to come up with a similar conclusion to yours.

@deep_333 - I dunno. I just heard a full on Klangfilm Bionor system in a very large room (34 x 20 x 12, roughly). It took what I considered to be a ceiling in music reproduction up several levels, and I'm no neophyte. Costly, yes. Hard to source, and maintain, absolutely. But, it was far different than the modern forensic sound, simply a big wave of sound, coherent, seamless and balanced from bottom to top, and called no attention to the machinery of reproduction. We were listening at levels far louder than I normally do and zero fatigue--it really is a different experience than a lot of what we think of as "ultra" hifi today. 

To the extent any of this is trickle down, or simply a reference for what a music reproduction system at the limits is capable of, it informed me of a new standard. Whether I can personally achieve that, we'll see. It's money, time, space, a big room, not so much "acoustic treatment" as it is solid walls due to pressurization by the system so far as I can tell. 

@whart  Hearing a system with large horn speakers like the Bionor’s is certainly different than what one typically hears from most (all?) modern systems. But this sound is very much what one hears from the typical large film/theater system from back in the day. Like you said, it is a big wave of sound, but how realistic is that sound?? IMO, the sound of large speakers in a disco or of large horn based speakers ( JBL’s, Cerwin’s etc), is similar. Initially impressive as to dynamics, but IMO ...severely lacking in so many ways that I would not say that this type of home reproduction is something to be sought after. YMMV and clearly one's personal taste.