What Speakers That Cost $370,000 Sound Like

This...

[dramatic music]

Is coming out of the Wilson Chronosonic XVX.

Whereas this...

[dramatic music]

Is coming outta the Sonos Era 300.

So how does a speaker,

the price of a house sound different

to a speaker I use at home?

And why would someone spend such an insane amount of money?

Let's find out.

I asked Chris Haslam Wired's audio expert

to give me some steer on what we should be listening to,

and he suggested piano music.

The piano is one of the most difficult instruments

to reproduce in a recording.

[mellow piano music]

Listening to that music on the Sonos

is a very pleasant experience.

But listening to Clair de Lune on the Wilson Speakers

was an emotional experience.

[dramatic piano music]

It wasn't just bits in that music

that I haven't heard properly before,

but it's the spaces in the song, the absence of sound,

the weight of the keys, you can feel the difference to it,

it has a physical response almost.

[dramatic piano music]

You need a lot of detail to create this kind of

rich and textured sound.

And the Chronosonic uses very large,

powerful components to pump this out.

First thing you notice is this thing.

It's huge.

It's over six feet tall.

Each speaker is a super tower

of seven drivers stacked on top of each other.

The more drivers, the more detail you can hear.

Most people think these are speakers,

what they're actually called a drivers.

The whole thing is the speaker.

The most crucial part of any speaker is the driver.

This is the part of the speaker

that turns audio signals into sound waves.

We've got 12 inch and a 10 inch base drivers here,

a tweeter here,

the high range as the name implies,

and you've got mid-range drivers,

either side of it, three of those there.

And you've also got a upward firing tweeter

rear at the back here

to give you sort of spatial sound as it were,

or broaden out the sound.

You might expect the tweeter to be

at the top of the driver array,

but it doesn't actually matter where it is.

As long as the tweeter is pointing towards a rear level,

your brain can determine much better

where the higher frequencies are coming from.

So they need to be directed at you.

Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths

with sharper curves,

which makes it easier for our ears to locate them.

While high frequencies are like a flashlight,

low frequencies are like a glow

spreading out and making it harder to pinpoint the source,

which is why so often with subwoofers

you can put them anywhere in a room,

but these speakers need to be pointing at your head.

Many home speakers, like the Sonos Eras,

all squeeze drivers into one box or bar.

What's clever about the Sonos

is the amount of stuff they've managed to squeeze

into this tiny package.

So you've got a center driver, two side drivers,

you've got a upward firing tweeter

and you've got two woofers,

as well as a computer amplifier

and everything you need to run this speaker

within this housing.

And the difference here is that

these Wilson speakers are passive.

They've got no power in them at all.

They need to have separate amplifiers,

a preamp and enormous amounts of other equipment

and huge cables just to make them work.

Yes, the speakers cost $370,000,

but you're gonna be spending probably

north of a million dollars with everything else

you need to make these run.

This makes the Sonos far more convenient to set up.

While it's still a premium speaker for most budgets,

it doesn't cover nearly as much detail

or frequency range as the Wilson.

When you're talking about frequency,

imagine that as a rainbow spectrum.

The sound rainbow coming from the Wilson

is much brighter and much wider

than the rainbow coming from the Sonos.

This speaker can only play 41 hertz to 16 kilohertz,

whereas this one has a frequency range

of 20 hertz to 30 kilohertz,

which is beyond the range of human hearing.

It's got more detail than you can possibly hear.

So what's the point?

Take a cymbal crash.

Humans can't hear the highest frequency of the crash,

but what you can hear will sound more realistic

and vibrant with a wider frequency range.

It's a bit like a high resolution camera

capturing details you might not notice

but made the overall picture sharper.

Okay, so we're gonna try going down to 20 hertz.

You won't be able to hear it

because it won't work on your speakers.

Our microphones won't pick up something so low either,

but you'll see it.

Let's have a look.

See how it's moving that paper.

Low frequencies produce powerful sound waves

with larger amplitudes.

This causes physical vibrations

moving lightweight objects like paper.

It's quite a deep unsettling noise,

which you don't want to be around for too long.

If you play the same frequency, 20 hertz on the Sonos,

you can't hear a thing because it doesn't go down that low.

But low frequencies can also create bad kinds of vibration.

Have you ever played a low frequency through bad speakers?

You'll notice a rattle

and a clicking in the casing

as soon as you play anything with bass.

Vibration is the enemy of speakers.

You only want to hear the vibrations

coming from the drivers themselves.

Heavy casing dampens and absorbs excess vibrations

made within the driver.

The base drivers are made of a trade secret material

that is so dense it can stop this distortion.

Got aerospace grade aluminum architecture

here on the side for the driver array at the top.

It is very heavy and very, very solid.

No vibration and as inert as it possibly can be.

So all you are hearing is the vibrations of the music

and nothing else.

And what's the unique selling point of these drivers?

The accuracy.

With tiny adjustments to the back,

the music hits your ears in perfect sync.

Here at the back,

there is a micro adjustment of time alignment system

that is capable of adjusting the time

at which the sound from these drivers

hits your ears within a measurement

of two millionths of a second.

A tiny change that the average human ear

wouldn't even be able to notice.

The idea here is that Wilson wants your hearing

to be the limit, not the technology.

The whole point of the Chronosonic

is that you need to sit in one spot in the room.

That's because all the drivers are angled

to hit your ears at precisely the right time.

If one tiny thing goes out of kilter, even by a fraction,

the illusion is destroyed.

So it should sound radically different as you move around.

[dramatic piano music]

The Wilsons, you can definitely hear how the sound changes,

especially when you get into the middle here,

where you get into that sweet spot

that the speakers are being directed towards.

And when you move out of it,

you can hear that the balance of everything

is out of kilter.

When you get in the right zone,

that's when everything starts to make sense.

Imagine some flashlights pointing at a painting,

a slight tweak in direction,

and you'd still be able to enjoy the painting

just less vividly.

But with the Sonos, the whole gallery is already lit.

Just as you manipulate the pixels on Photoshop,

digital signal processing or DSP,

manipulates digital signals to enhance audio.

That digital jiggery pokery,

that DSP is working its magic.

So it's creating a soundscape

that is trying to be uniform

no matter where you are in the room.

And it actually does manage to do that

to a very convincing degree,

especially considering it's all coming from one unit.

But you do notice obviously a difference in sound quality,

but it's difficult to hear a change in that sound quality

as you go about the room.

Completely different to the Wilson.

And ultimately all the money

that's gone into the Chronosonic

is there to make you feel something.

So having listened to these two systems side by side,

the Sonos is an all in one system that's plug and play

and there's an enormous number of compromises here,

but it's really easy and the standard is good.

It's what everyone really wants

if you want an hassle-free life.

The Wilson speaker,

it is enormously complicated to set up,

unbelievably expensive to run,

but the sound difference you get,

the emotional response you get is another level.

But the $400,000 question is can speakers

that cost the same as a house in Colorado Springs

ever be worth it?

In short, if you love and I mean love music

and you have the means,

then these open up an audio world

you simply never knew existed.

It's like trying Japanese Kobe steak

when you've spent your entire life

eating In-N-Out burgers.

And the price for such an experience

is always going to be high,

almost unbelievably high

compared to the perfectly fine Sonos,

but however capable Sonos is, it just plays music for you.

Astonishingly, the Wilsons change the very way you feel

about sound and that's so hard to put a price on.

[dramatic music]