[jmimac351]

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[Tyson]

Danny is a master.

[goggle1824]

What year(s) were these $16,000? (MSRP I assume).

[Hobbsmeerkat]

What year(s) were these $16,000? (MSRP I assume).

The V1 like these seem to have been available 2006-2012 timeframe.

[mkrawcz]

Those speakers are going to sound awesome now.

[Hobbsmeerkat]

Let it be known... I really like these speakers and just wanted them to not rip my head off when I played them On Axis.  100% going to do this upgrade.  I have a milling machine... I'm thinking of machining a custom enclosure for the crossover... keeping it external, and connecting via umbilical - just like the original.  The external crossover sits at the bottom of the stand in a machined spot, behind the vertical column.  I may have a clear lexan top to see the parts, recessed stainless fasteners, etc.  No permanent mod to the original design. Plug and play.

We're all excited to follow along with your upgrade process and hear about your thoughts about the sound before and after. (Especially since the stock crossover is already external)   

[Hobbsmeerkat]

The Bully is a very exciting speaker, I personally like it more than the Brute, tbh.
We've just about got everything ready to go for it.

What's sad in a way is that the tweeter's on-axis response is hampered by the foam layer surrounding the tweeter causing the wavy response of the tweeter. (The grill makes it worse along with the hump at 600Hz)
Had they used a little more layered felt and not cut it perfectly round, the on-axis response could have likely been much smoother especially on axis. As it is, there's a regular pattern of peaks/dips, with the peaks in the on-axis becoming dips off axis & vice versa. The cabinet also needed a little more stuffing to control the resonance near the tuning frequency of the port.
I'd imagine that wilson put a lot of time/effort into picking good, quality drivers, cabinetry, paint etc, but it's interesting to see how little things here and there were seemingly overlooked leading to the measurements we get..

As far as what they did do with the crossover on the woofer? If I were to guess, they designed the crossovers using electrical parameters only, rather than the actual acoustic output of the drivers in that box. It certainly wouldn't be the first time baffle-step got missed in the design phase of a speaker..

[Hobbsmeerkat]

Very interesting.  So, you think if the felt were in strips / squared off around the tweeter / woofer, that would make a positive difference in on axis response?  Wilson sells replacement felt, so I could get some and trim to suit. 

I've got a UMIK microphone... I haven't figured out exactly how to do a solid measurement, yet.  I plan to do some other builds and Clio would be cool... (I wish the pricing were lower)

The felt isn't really the issue, it's more the rubber/foam material that sits out in front of and surrounds the tweeter/felt.
It sits higher than the felt layer, and is also a perfect circular cut out, which means the diffraction issues that creates will all arrive at the same time, hence the regular patterns of peaks and dips in the tweeter measurements.

[Hobbsmeerkat]

I wouldn't remove the foam.
The trick will be to build layers of soft felt to smooth the transition to the foam layer to help give it a gradual transition to the foam layer.
I played with felt strips a little bit but most the the bits of felt we have are on the larger side, and generally made matters worse in other areas.

It may affect the notch filter at 6Khz a bit, as it won't have to work as aggressive, but everything else should work the same.

[Tyson]

If I were you I wouldn't stress too much about it.  It might be a fun project to learn about some stuff but really the overall response now is excellent, far better than most commercial speakers achieve. 

Also, IME, it's peaks in the 800hz to around 2khz that are the most annoying.  Above 5khz is mostly ambience information, so a spike would just be a bit more 'air' and a small dip won't be noticeable at all.

[Hobbsmeerkat]

What's interesting is that the only parts affected in both of Wilson's graphs are the top and bottom of the response..
Neither of which are due to the cable/umbilical.

The "rise" shown in the bass of the first graph is simply due to the boundary reinforcement provided by the wall behind it. But then they also opt to have you roll off the top end by using a higher value to bring down the tweeter level, which seems really silly to me.

Then for the "free space" graph, it simply shows the lack of any boundary reinforcement, and they keep the tweeter a little higher.

I'd be curious to know how they came up with this explanation, cuz it doesn't make sense to me, especially when the measurements show no change between the cables. 

[Tyson]

So, how long before the speakers make it back to you and are up and playing?  Inquiring minds want to know!

[jmimac351]

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[Tyson]

Who knows, you might even be able to toe the speakers in now!!

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