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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Does he still make the WAMM? posted by niws on May 24, 2012 at 19:52:58:
had also ceased production of the B139 racetrack woofers. Wilson bought up as much stock as they could for repair of WAMM systems already out in the field. They were headed in a new direction anyway with the design of the X1 system. Remember that Wilson first started prototyping the WAMM all the way back in the late 1970s so the design was getting quite old for a speaker system when the last of the Series 7 WAMMs were made. Very time intensive also as each system was a custom order and Wilson went to the owner's to voice and setup the system to their listening room. Therefore, each WAMM system is unique in a way.
If you were curious about the drivers, all the suppliers had left the OEM business. That would have mandated that Wilson completely redesign the WAMM system and it just wasn't worth the effort thus the new X line.
For a breakdown of the drivers: Mr Kliewer supplied the esl tweeters which were the JansZen electrostatic as Mr. Kliewer had obtained all the tooling for both the JansZen and RtR electrostatic cells. The inverted titanium dome tweeters used in the mid modules were from Focal who ceased the OEM line. The midrange was a 4 inch mid sourced first from Braun (yes that Braun they had an audio division until the 1980s), out of their L100 speaker and later around the series 3 from SEAS, FM series treated paper not their magnesium line. The woofers were the aforementioned KEF B139 also out of production at that time. Lastly, the subwoofer was a 15 inch modified unit from Focal and in the later series an 18 inch special designed driver from the German company Magnat. The equalizer was a John Curl modified Crown EQ2 which was part of the system and not intended to be removed. It fed into the 2 way active, solid state by the way, crossover that split the signal between the subwoofer and mid tower array amplifiers. The system had to be bi-amplified. The mid tower arrays had a conventional passive crossover at 450hz between the KEF woofer and SEAS midrange. Also a notch filter as the KEF racetrack woofers have a nasty breakup resonance that must be compensated for otherwise the midrange will be adversely affected. The 9 panel electrostatic tweeter array only came in above 5 kHz and at a reduced volume. The Focal tweeters did not crossover to the JansZen tweeters, there wasn't a high pass, the JansZen acted as a supplemental super-tweeter and not as a driver in a 5 way system. The WAMM was basically a 3 way speaker system with a separate subwoofer and supplemental supertweeter.
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Follow Ups
- He stopped production in the 90s, when Don Kliewer passed away no more electrostatic tweeters. KEF - cfb 06:52:23 05/25/12 (0)
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