LOUDSPEAKERS

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go to: Contents | Features | Bookshelf, Stand-Mount and Desktop | Floorstanding | Editors' Choice Awards Wilson Audio Sophia Series 3 Sweet Spot Neil Gader The loudspeakers of Wilson Audio need little introduction. For thirty years Dave Wilson and his team of engineers and designers have produced leading-edge models of remarkable quality and refinement. During my recent visit to the factory I have to admit I was awed by the operation. The fabrication process borders on the surgical and the final fit and finish make a whole lot of other loudspeakers look as though they were nailed together at Home Depot. Yet the high end is also a notoriously fractious place with no shortage of strong opinions. Even a brand as revered as Wilson has taken some hits over the years. Personally I found the voicing of certain models—versions of the iconic WATT come to mind—too coolly clinical for my taste. Detailed, ultra-lowdistortion, and dynamic Inarguably. But they didn’t connect with me on a purely musical and emotional level. Like they say: It’s what makes a horse race. And it’s what made my assignment to review the Wilson Audio’s latest Sophia, now in Series 3 attire, all the more intriguing. Close Encounters of the Series 3 Kind For those who are not up to speed on the Sophia Series 3, a quick refresher: The Sophia is Wilson’s entry-level floorstander. It made its debut in 2001. It’s a three-way design in a bass-reflex enclosure with a rear-firing port and a small resistive vent for the mid/tweeter section. The upper third of the cabinet houses a midrange and tweeter driver acoustically time-aligned on the rearward-leaning baffle. Per Wilson practice there are binding posts for single wiring only. Befitting its more accessible price point in the Wilson line, the Sophia is designed to provide an easy ride for amplifiers of all stripes, not just the high and mighty. Sensitivity and nominal impedance are straight down the reasonable middle at 87dB and 4 ohms respectively. (See the technical sidebar for Series 3 specifics.) The Sophia Series 3 is a serious, nearly full-range proposition 78 Guide to High-Performance Loudspeakers www.theabsolutesound.com previous page NEXT page
go to: Contents | Features | Bookshelf, Stand-Mount and Desktop | Floorstanding | Editors' Choice Awards EQUIPMENT REVIEW - Wilson Audio Sophia Series 3 and tonally a resoundingly neutral one. Frequency response as measured via my AudioTools RTA came up persuasively flat in my room. And that flat response carries over to its sonic personality, which is dominant and full-bodied, with a blush of warmth and bloom in the mids, a natural sibilance range, and just a hint of sparkle on top. The drivers cohere exceptionally well across the octaves, and most critically they create a single voice—an alliance of output that never hints at colorations due to the differing driver-cone materials that the Sophia uses. There is little or no sense of tweeter localization, which for me is deadly—the audio equivalent of a lighthouse beacon. The Sophia 3 has an intense range of expression, tonally and dynamically. In sheer output there’s no quit in this speaker. It plays fiendishly loud (cue Metallica). The Sophia could easily be the high-end poster child for inspiring bad behavior and other naughty things. Yet it remains utterly composed under all conditions and counterintuitively doesn’t even need to play loudly to get the blood flowing, being nearly as expressive at softer listening levels. From the first disc I played—Steve Winwood’s The Finer Things in a superior 45rpm remix—to the last, there was no escaping the resolving power at both micro and macro levels. For example, the contrast between the initial strike of the snare on the Winwood album and the sound of its long decay as it flutters the reverb plate was so stunning that I felt like I was watching it disappear down a studio hallway. In the micro sense, the Sophia captured the delicacy of a solo violin clinging to a note at the top of its range and the soft drone of Joni Mitchell’s dulcimer launched from the sweep of her plectrum. The speaker is equally comfortable in both worlds. Bass response extends into the upper 20Hz range in my room and yields a bucketful of usable response deeper still. During the “Serenata” from Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella [Argo], the trombone was crisp, fast and authoritative, with the basses striking a fine balance between pitch-control and big-bodied resonance. Even if the Sophia won’t quite grasp the last third of an octave of the deepest bass, I can guarantee no one will be disappointed when the pipe organ kicks in during the waning moments of Vaughan Williams’ Antartica. Mid and upper bass is resonant, fleshy, and well nigh pitch-perfect. If the Sophia 3 has any character at all, it can be heard as glimmers of some bonus articulation in the upper-mid (presence) range. It’s a subtle character that may remind some of top studio monitors that engineers rely on to see into the darkest recesses of a mix. Given Wilson’s engineering roots and familiarity with the pro-audio world this thought wouldn’t be a stretch. These gray-matter descriptions are important but if there’s one word to describe the most unexpected aspect of listening to the Sophia 3, it’s physical. There’s something more underpinning each instrument—a rigid framework that supports an instrument’s voice and character. It doesn’t matter the note, the chord, the octave, the instrument; the Sophia 3 reproduces each with dimensional body and acoustic energy. This physicalization of sound begins at the leading transient and continues unbroken through the body of the instrument and out into the acoustic of the venue itself. Each stroke of a drum, bow coursing strings, pressurization around a mouthpiece is weighted with intent. A good example of this is the original Blood, Sweat &Tears Direct Disk Labs LP. I know this disc like I know my own face. Not a perfect recording—in fact I had long written off this detailed but overly bright hunk of vinyl. Lew Soloff’s trumpet blast that’s held at the end “More and More” normally sounds like an over-baked electronic emulation of a trumpet. However, for the first time this note was fully realized from mouthpiece to bell —no longer a sterile toot but a genuinely brassy blast. A few minutes with the Sophia and you become conscious of two key issues—speed and decay. Music never seems to originate from the Sophia’s enclosure. During Kissin’s reading of Pictures at an Exhibition [RCA] there were long stretches when I was so mesmerized by the performance that all critical listening vanished . All that remained were the Steinway and the pianist, the creaky bench, and the odd rustle of the artist’s clothing when he poised his hands in anticipation of the next measure. Equally impressive is its range of dynamic energy. For classical music this means the dancing micro-dynamics on a soft solo violin or the baton-snapping crescendos from the tympani bombs thrown from the back of the soundstage during Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man [Reference Recordings]. Or the way the Sophia 3 turns hip-hop into a contact sport for adrenaline junkies. This speaker moves air in voluminous amounts, and with it paints the listening room with the warmth and ambience of the recorded venue. It soaks the room with acoustic information, allowing the space in and around players to further expand. Dynamically, and I mean down to the finest gradations, the Sophia 3 shuts the door on nearly every other speaker I’ve had in my room. No doubt a large measure of the Sophia 3’s success is owed to the enclosure’s careful tuning, the lack of resonant colorations that muddy or “slow” the sound, and an absence of enclosure leakage or absorption. One of the barometers I use to observe such speaker variations is Tom Waits’ performance of “Take It With Me When I Go” [Mule Variations], particularly the moment when his voice descends into a deep chestiness. On lesser speakers a slight blurring effect often occurs in this region, but the Sophia was unfazed and absolutely clean in its reproduction. It left me with an important impression—that I was hearing only what Wilson Audio had designed into the product. Any deviations from the mission plan were detected and dispensed with much earlier during Sophia’s development stages. Sonically, Sophia is not a speaker that tosses any gutter balls. I have no quibbles with the prodigious speed and dynamism and integration of the inverted dome tweeter but I think there’s still some vestigial dryness, a lack of give in the upper register of violin that SPECS & PRICING Drivers: 1" inverted dome, 7" cellulose paper pulp, 10" aluminum cone Frequency response: 20Hz–22kHz +/-3dB Sensitivity: 87dB Impedance: 4 ohms (3.1 min) Dimensions: 41.3" x 13.7" x 18.9" Weight: 165 lbs. Price: $17,900 Wilson Audio Specialties 2233 Mountain Vista Lane Provo, Utah 84606 USA (801) 377-2233 wilsonaudio.com CLICK HERE TO COMMENT at www.theabsolutesound.COM 79 Guide to High-Performance Loudspeakers www.theabsolutesound.com previous page NEXT page
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