$2500 WTMW Horizontally Oriented

Now we get to take a peak at a very high-end center speaker design. Since this large speaker easily outgrew my test stand, it gets to rest in The Captain’s Chair for this test, receiving better treatment than most of my family. The Stressless® Recliner naturally cradled the speaker in all of its supple softness, which certainly resulted in a less stressed sound.

This $2500 supermodel maintains a mostly horizontal profile, while reducing potential wave interference by having less of the bandwidth play through horizontally redundant drivers. Speakers that have the tweeter and midrange vertically arranged will naturally have a smoother off-axis response. To supplement the dynamic headroom of this speaker and allow you to lower your subwoofer crossover point (although there are good arguments to keep it at 80 Hz), this design has two woofers that are low-pass filtered at 350 Hz.

The 1/24 octave chart below shows a generally inaudible difference in the speaker’s response across various angles. The frequency range of the redundant drivers, from 80 to 350 Hz, is highlighted by the yellow bracket.

In the 1/6 octave chart below, the off-axis response of this speaker was nearly perfect. We can see one significant -5 dB wave cancellation from the woofers interfering with each other just above their crossover point at 360 Hz. Even though this would be audible, because the entire effect is such a narrow bandwidth, this really isn’t something to worry about. The off-axis response of the tweeter is fantastic.

The standard deviation of the frequency response from the two woofers calculated to 1.02. This was by far the best performing horizontally oriented configuration.