Wilson Audio Chronosonic XVX

The Chronosonic XVX is Wilson Audio's single-cabinet reference — the loudspeaker that brings the WAMM Master Chronosonic's time-domain engineering into a form a serious listening room can actually accommodate. It was Daryl Wilson's first flagship as chief designer, and every driver in its four-way, seven-driver array traces its lineage directly to the WAMM program.

The argument for the XVX is time. The midrange and tweeter modules sit in an adjustable array that is aimed and aligned to the listening position during installation, so that each frequency band launches together and arrives together — the discipline Wilson calls aspherical group delay, and the reason a properly set up XVX images with a stability most loudspeakers only approximate. The Convergent Synergy Mk5 tweeter is joined by a rear-firing ambient tweeter that restores the sense of space recordings actually contain, and the 7″ QuadraMag midranges use alnico magnets — the material chosen for the WAMM — for their linearity through the band where voices live.

The bass section makes its own case. Twin 12.5″ woofers load an XLF ported enclosure whose port can be configured to vent to the front or the rear of the cabinet — a decision made for the room, not the brochure, and one of the details that separates a loudspeaker designed for real installations from one designed for anechoic charts. At 1,370 pounds per channel, the enclosures are machined from Wilson's own composite materials and contribute effectively nothing of their own.

Where the Alexx V is the practical reference and the WAMM is the destination, the XVX is the point at which the WAMM program becomes attainable in one cabinet per side. In Scottsdale it is most often heard with Dan D'Agostino amplification — the pairing at the backbone of most reference systems we build — and it can be auditioned against both its siblings in the same visit, which is the honest way to decide between them. Installation and time-alignment by our Wilson-trained team are part of what the price buys, and we treat them that way.