Comedy hour: Dave Wilson speaks...

Interviewer is a W/P owner and fanboy and a 6goons hack so he has much Kool Aid in his system.

"You need to let the cables calm down".

I was gonna add more quotes, but I was too busy wiping the vomit off my keyboard.

"when you're setting up the speaker, walking around on the carpet you can build up a static electricity charge yourself, and if you touch the frame of the driver it can induce a current into the crossover network and cause some charging. It might be useful for us to ship the speakers with a shorting plug or cable across the terminals to drain that down"

We've lowered the "noise floor" of the drivers".

Does that mean they simply reduced the sensitivity?

I never thought of a driver producing any noise by itself.

I'm curious what the measurement method was that proved the "cables calming down" theory, i.e., cables having "jitter" when they're "fresh out of the box".

It's a shame, as one can clearly hear the various "tells" upon transitioning into la-la land,..ie, his sentence structuring, pausing and searching for words/descriptors to present his "findings".

It's a shame really. I've met/interacted with the guys from Wilson, and they seemed great. Never met David, however those I did have the pleasure of meeting were normal and had fun poking fun at the audio fringe and the BS claims that accompany that group. If you've not seen the cabinets in person, and touched them and given them the knuckle rap test, they truly are amazing pieces of work. The synthetic resin material used is phenomenally inert.

Some of the ideas are fundamentally strong and easily measurable. Cable settling however??????????????????

+1. You've got to wonder if he really believes what he's saying or if he's pandering to the oddiophiles who do believe it.

The reality is-however-that a large number of the people who go by facts and aren't mislead by such statements are NOT the ones buying loudspeakers at that price point.

The ones who often buy at that pricepoint are not "audio guys" and who have more "disposable income"-and are often mislead and embarassed to say that they don't hear a difference in various "tweaks".

I think a good product would be an automatic "cable cooker" that would keep the cables in their "broken in state" when no signal is present. Then turn off when a signal is present.

That way you don't lose any advantage of having already "broken in" the cables. it would "keep them fresh".

It could also serve to "keep the charge" on the crossover-so you don't have to wait till the capacitors "fill up" before sounding good.

And if you did ultrasonically-the "noise" would not bother people in the room when the system is not being used.

OK Ya heard it here first-so no copying my idea!

Too late, on the market

That whole statement by Mr Wilson has me a little perplexed. If you can discharge electricity into the drivers frame and have it reach the crossover, wouldn't touching the frame while the speaker is playing shock you?

My point exactly. Spending that kind of money on a speaker indicates that the buyer doesn't know much, if anything, about how speakers work, so they're very likely to fall for marketspeak.

You would only get shocked if there is enough potential between the frame and whatever else you are touching. If you isolate yourself from other paths-you can stick your finger in the wall socket and not get shocked. Electricity has to have a path to flow-or nothing happens.

But more to the point, except for a very few old vintage speakers, I have never seen a modern loudspeaker driver that has one of the input terminals attached to the frame. now maybe theirs are different-I have no idea.

But if one of the input terminals is not attached to the frame-touching the frame will simply not do anything like "discharging into the crossover".

And I wonder how many of their typical customers go up and touch the frames of the drivers. I would imagine they would want to keep people and "poking fingers" away from those very expensive loudspeakers.

Audioquest DBS, dielectric bias system.

Ah yes, another source of snake oil. All they're missing are Bybee Quantum Purifiers...and a bag of Magic Pebbles.

Don't forget about those Shun Mook discs, all you have to do is place them on an amp or speakers and presto

JBL apply DC bias to their plastic caps in the xovers of the more expensive systems.

Tannoy have an earth terminal on some of their systems.



Some reading.