Wilson Audio is an American high-end audio company, located in Utah, run and founded by David Wilson

Once he'd acquired his passion for audio, one of young Dave Wilson's first activities was to build a Heathkit amplifier. His enthusiasm outran his discipline, however, and as soon as he threw the power switch on his newly finished creation, the house filled with acrid smoke. 

Authentic Excellence

People sometimes refer to our loudspeakers as luxury items. When I hear that, I wonder what the word "luxury" means to them. Frank Lloyd Wright famously observed, "Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities." I imagine what he meant was that, for him, having things of quality was a necessity of life. 

Alexandria XLF joins the Alexandria family, not as a replacement for the Series 2, but as its measurably more ambitious sibling.

While maintaining the recognizable Alexandria form factor, it is physically larger, with 14% greater bass volume. Thicker cabinet walls and added bracing for an even more inert enclosure.It introduces passive bass management technology unique in the audio world.

It introduces a new Convergent Synergy tweeter, a new crossover, and a host of parts all chosen through sedulous listening trials.

From the time he started building loudspeakers in his garage, Dave Wilson had one motivating passion: to make the reproduction of music sound as much like the real thing as possible. Although he is acutely aware of the limitations imposed on his dream by available driver technology, cabinet materials and the laws of physics, the goal remains the same. Dave is an idealist.

From his earliest days as a loudspeaker designer, Dave has been transfixed by this observation: Why don't loudspeakers sound more like live, unampflified music? 
 

The Alexandria XLF project was launched as the most unrestrained effort to date to close the distance between live and reproduced sound. Despite the obvious fact that a loudspeaker will ultimately be judged by how it sounds, many designers instinctively devalue listening as an objective design tool. As a result, these loudspeaker designers reject the proven practice of the scientific method.

An Engineering Challenge

Although the new loudspeaker retains the unmistakable form and lines of Alexandria Series 2 (seen on the left), the architecture of the XLF (on the right) has evolved to support new technology.

Since its introduction in 1998, the MAXX has proved a clear success by every measure—in units sold, in glowing reviews, and in the degree to which it has become the reference for many of those leading reviewers. (One writer said the MAXX Series 2 was "the most significant product I've written about in my eight years as an audio reviewer.") Perhaps MAXX's greatest measure of success is its use by top-tier electronics and cable manufacturers in their reference systems.

We realized that, as good as the Series 2 was, the existing platform stood in the way of further improvement. So we conceived an all-new design.

Alexia represents the first entirely new loudspeaker platform from Wilson Audio in nearly half a decade.

Two years in development, Alexia brings the superior propagation delay technology of Wilson’s flagship loudspeakers to a compact design with a footprint not much larger than a Sasha W/P.

Indeed, Alexia derives much of its DNA from the massive Alexandria XLF, and brings the same kind of state-of-the-art musicality to a speaker than can easily live in smaller rooms and more intimate listening environments.

Told by the members of the team that designed and built Alexia, the video below reveals the story of Alexia’s creation, from inception to completion. The challenges of building a compact, three-module loudspeaker were both aesthetic and techni- cal, and, indeed, the project—originally conceived before the Alexandria XLF—had to be put on hold until new drivers and new cabinet construction techniques were perfected in Wilson’s flagship loudspeaker, before the technology could be readily deployed in a brand new speaker platform. 

The result is an exciting new benchmark in musical realism—not merely an enlarged Sasha, or a diminuitive MAXX, but an entirely new thing, one that completely rede- fines the performance envelope for a loudspeaker its size.