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Dave Wilson has never thought much about the market for his loudspeakers. In truth, he never really
intended to be in the loudspeaker business at all. In 1983, he built a small location monitor for
his nascent recording business.
When a steady stream of people began showing up at his doorstep demanding to buy the original WATT,
Dave at first demurred. He knew to make a reasonable profit on his mini-monitor he would have charge
three times the price of the most comparable speaker on the market.
It didn't seem to matter. People wanted to buy his loudspeaker.
Wilson Audio designs all its products around a sole criterion: is it something Dave Wilson would want
to use and own? And those products have always been priced on what they cost to build: nothing less,
and—more importantly—nothing more.
Economists estimate the rate of inflation on "luxury" goods and services is several times
higher than the national average. In large part this is due to the realization among sellers of
exclusive goods that they can charge whatever the market will bear.
Wilson Audio has always rejected the notion of "perceived value." Our only metric is intrinsic
value. In a market increasingly crowded with over $100k loudspeakers, how does the discerning audiophile
distinguish authentic value from products merely wrapped in the mystique of exclusivity and high
price?
At Wilson Audio, we believe the answer lies in the intelligence and integrity of each of the myriad
design choices that comprise our loudspeakers.
A sign that hung in Albert Einstein's Princeton office famously put it this way: "Not everything that
can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." It takes wisdom and experience
to know the difference, especially for a loudspeaker designer.
For Dave Wilson, the primary thing that counts—and has from the beginning of his career—is the
quest to reproduce music in a way that preserves the numinous and emotional impact of the live event. It's
an objective that's nearly impossible to quantify yet amazingly easy to discern. Its units of measure are
tingles in the spine and hairs on the back of the neck—or even, perhaps, aqueous secretions from the
lachrymal glands.
The challenge of creating a loudspeaker that can match live music is twofold: first, grasp the auditory
cues that communicate the brio of live music to the brain, and second, in the unfeeling realm of
drivers, crossovers,
and cabinets, know how to manipulate those materials to preserve the ineffable effect that music plays
in our emotional lives.
In the case of Alexandria Series 2, the further challenge was to take a loudspeaker that had already,
for many people, redefined the state of the art and elevate it to the next level of authentic value. The
challenge was to move the marker forward an immediately recognizable degree.
The path to enlightenment always begins in the recognition there is more to learn. Dave Wilson unwittingly
began the journey that led to the development of Alexandria Series 2 in Vienna,
Austria—in a 19th century concert hall.
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