$2500 WTMW Vertically Oriented

To experiment with this heavyweight in a vertical orientation, it not only required The Captain’s Chair, but also The Comfy Pillow. Naturally, I assume the pillow further reduced any stresses the speaker would feel. I was going to draw the line if it also needed slippers and a paper, but it turned out the only additional effort I needed was to endure the well-deserved ribbing from onlookers. This design doesn’t have square ends, so you’d never want to do this permanently, but let’s see what happens.

In the 1/24 octave chart below, you can see that something is worse in the upper midrange and lower treble. With the tweeter and midrange arranged horizontally you can now see the wave interference above and below the 4 kHz crossover point. This company uses a first-order crossover between their tweeter and midrange, which means that there are about two octaves where there the two drivers interact with each other. If vertically aligned, this wouldn’t be an issue and their integration of the two drivers sounds absolutely perfect. None of their speakers are meant to have a horizontal tweeter-midrange arrangement like this, and their top models don’t even place the midrange in the same baffle as the woofers.

In the 1/6 octave chart below, you can more clearly see the audible performance of this well-pampered configuration. By vertically orienting it, we have successfully eliminated the wave interference of the two woofers just above their crossover point at 360 Hz. However, like we saw in the horn-tweeter design, this speaker is clearly not designed to be positioned like this. The first-order tweeter crossover is audibly allowing wave interference to occur for an octave above and below the crossover point. We’ve fixed a minor wave interference problem but created another which is much worse. If only they had a center speaker that had all the drivers arranged vertically… oh wait, they call those “main” speakers. Unfortunately, many people are stuck in the mindset that the center channel must only use a special center speaker design. In reality, there are often better options, but because this speaker only has a couple octaves where the drivers are redundant, this design isn’t that compromised.

The wave interference from the woofers was clearly improved by vertically orienting the speaker. The standard deviation in the woofers’ range of 80 to 350 Hz was calculated to be 0.61. The inter-driver interference we created between the tweeter and midrange isn’t included in this score. Including crossover effects and inherent driver radiation patterns (e.g. the horn tweeter in Part 1) would increase the scope too much. I wanted to focus as tightly as reasonable on just the interaction between horizontally arranged redundant drivers.

While the woofer wave interference was practically eliminated by rotating this speaker vertically, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this for this design. However, having shown that one type of sonic compromise can be avoided by thinking vertically it would be wise to pursue using three identical “main” speakers across your front soundstage. Their floor standing speaker with identical drivers and crossover points retail at $4000 for the pair, so again in theory you could get better sound at a lower cost if this company sold them individually. I know that one high-end multichannel audio reviewer I follow uses three of this company’s floor standing speakers across his front soundstage.

In the manufacturer’s main brochure on this series, they proudly show off how Skywalker Sound uses three identical floor-standing “main” speakers across their front soundstage. It’s curious that while configurations like this are correctly portrayed as achieving the highest multichannel front soundstage possible, the company only sells their main speakers in pairs. Maybe Lucas just threw the extra in the closet.

On one hand, this center channel design avoids wave interference very reasonably. However on the other hand people in this price point are keenly interested in getting the best sound possible.