From the highly experienced audio design brain of Dave Wilson, Wilson Audio has unleashed a new product that is being dubbed the company’s magnus opus, the WAMM Master Chronosonic.

Dave has spent the better part of his life engaged in the difficult and demanding work of turning his ambitious dreams into physical creations, having a particular passion for re-creating the sound of a live performance. If Dave’s design journey could be summed up in a paragraph, it would be; ‘Why do certain transducers sound more like the live event, while others sound like loudspeakers? What is it about certain combinations of drivers, cabinet materials and even the geometric arrangement of those drivers that produces an intellectually and emotionally convincing verisimilitude of live music?’

Applying science to try and answer some of these questions, in the late 70s, Dave began to understand the importance of the time domain—specifically as it related to the transient propagation of individual drivers. He discovered that even tiny errors in the alignment of the drivers in relationship to the listener caused obvious sound-quality degradation.

When the drivers were aligned accurately to the listening position,

the loudspeaker sounded far more lifelike. These discoveries led to a patent for adjustable-propagation-delay loudspeaker

arrays, as well as the method to measure time-domain distortion. Wilson Audios first commercial product, the WAMM (Wilson Audio Modular Monitor), was the physical manifestation of Dave’s theories. The WAMM was a multi-module loudspeaker, each module physically adjustable in relationship to one another in the time domain.

It is this approach which is at the heart of this new ambitious new project. The Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic will be hand built to order, with construction strictly limited to 70 pairs. Each pair takes 10 weeks to build, finished in Wilson Audio’s automotive-class paint facility in Utah to each customer’s specific colour requirements. The price of owning a pair of these extraordinary speakers in the UK is £700,000.

Product detail

The result of five years of research led by Dave Wilson himself, the new WAMM Master Chronosonic is the most time-domain accurate speaker ever made, says the company.

Each speaker stands over two metres tall and sports nine drive units. The MTM (Midrange-Tweeter-Midrange) section incorporates five drivers in individually adjustable modules, the Wilson Convergent Synergy Tweeter is flanked vertically by four midrange units, two for upper-midrange and two for lower-midrange.

Additional rear-firing high frequency and midrange drive units enhance spatial retrieval and soundstage resolution and the bass section features 10in and 12in drivers, configurable to fire forwards or backwards as best suits the customer’s listening room. The enclosures are made from proprietary composites called ‘X-material’, ’S-material’ and ‘W-material’, delivering vibration resistance and acoustic performance. Aerospace-grade aluminium is used for the MTM module support gantry.

Adjustability in the time domain is precise down to five millionths of a second for any installation – accuracy hitherto only achievable in the theoretical domain, says the maker.

Wilson Audio says the net result of its efforts is an astonishingly crisp, clear and dynamic sounding loudspeaker, capable of immense sonic scale and consummate verisimilitude.