Wilson Audio Sasha Loudspeaker (TAS 204)

Few products I’ve encountered have struck me the way Wilson Audio’s Sasha loudspeaker has. This isn’t because Sasha delivers the best sound I’ve ever heard, but because it seems fully realized in every aspect of design and performance. Listening to the Sasha gives the impression that the last iota of musicality has been wrung from its component parts. Not only that, but the Sasha is beautifully balanced in presentation—it’s the antithesis of a speaker that’s freakishly great in one sonic area but mediocre or worse in others. Moreover, the Sasha is simply gorgeous to look at, even by Wilson standards. The subtle enclosure facets, new to the Sasha, endow this loudspeaker with visual grace and elegance. The Sasha is made even more compelling by its ability to deliver the sound of a big speaker in a relatively compact package, and by its exceedingly reasonable price.

It might seem strange to call a Wilson speaker “reasonably priced” considering the recent debates in the Letters section and my recent editorials. But that’s exactly what it is. Wilson has managed to greatly improve upon the performance of the WATT/Puppy and at the same time lower the price. In addition, when the Sasha is judged on its sonic performance for the money, it turns out to be a tremendous bargain—and, in my view, the highest-value proposition in the Wilson line.

The Sasha might look superficially like a WATT/Puppy, but Wilson designed it on a clean sheet of paper. The platform is entirely new, and derives much of its technology from the MAXX 3 and Alexandria X-2. Like the MAXX 3 and the X-2, the Sasha’s crossover is housed in a chamber behind the woofer (it had been located inside the WATT’s enclosure). The low-pass filter remains at the bottom of the woofer enclosure, but the crossover components for the midrange and tweeter have been moved from the upper enclosure to the bass enclosure (behind an aluminum panel). This better isolated the crossover while also providing greater volume behind the midrange driver.

The midrange driver is derived from the X-2’s midrange unit, the driver that is the foundation of the X-2’s significant improvement over the X-1. Sasha’s tweeter is the same one used in the $68,000 MAXX 3. The woofer is entirely new, and features a magnet structure twice the size of the woofer used in the Puppy 8. (See the sidebar for more technical details.)

Listening

One aspect of Wilson loudspeakers that has made me gravitate toward them is their outstanding bass reproduction. From the Sophia to the X-2, Wilson loudspeakers have excelled at bottom-end weight, clarity, transient fidelity, dynamic shading, and tone color. I’ve heard many loudspeakers that get some of these qualities right, but not all of them simultaneously. Of these characteristics, perhaps the rarest is transient fidelity—the ability of a loudspeaker to reproduce music’s dynamic structure with one voice. All too often, the bass sounds like it’s a little slower on a transient’s leading edge (and hangs on longer on the trailing edge). As a result, the lower frequencies don’t have the agility of the rest of the spectrum, creating the sensation that the bass is lagging behind the music, like a heavy weight being dragged along for the ride. We’re so used to hearing this type of presentation that only when this form of distortion is removed can we recognize and describe it. Such was the case when I lived with the MAXX 2; it was revelatory in its combination of bass power, extension, and transient fidelity. The X-2 took these qualities several notches up, delivering what is the best bass I’ve heard from a hi-fi system.

The Sasha embodies these qualities as well, and is vastly better than the WATT/Puppy. This newest Wilson improves upon the bass speed and precision for which the company is justifiably famous, while also greatly increasing clarity and resolution in the lower registers. Think of the increase in midrange and treble clarity you hear by replacing a mediocre DAC with an outstanding one, or by adding a first-rate AC power conditioning system. You suddenly hear deeper into the music—its fine detail, micro-dynamic nuances, richness of tone color, and clarity of individual instrumental lines. Those are exactly the qualities I heard in the Sasha’s bass. It was as though a layer of opacity had been lifted, making the bottom end more transparent to the source. The improvement in the Sasha’s bass performance (relative to other loudspeakers and even to the WATT/Puppy 7) was akin to what one hears in the midrange and treble by replacing a slightly thick-sounding preamp with a highly transparent one.

I’d call the Sasha’s bass analytical, but that term implies a soulless detachment that doesn’t convey the experience of listening to music through this loudspeaker. The Sasha is intellectually analytical in its tremendous resolution of bass detail, yet it has a warmth, density of tone color, and richness of texture that make it anything but analytical in an emotional sense. In fact, it’s the Sasha’s resolution of even the lowest-level of lower-register detail that makes it so musically engaging and satisfying. It’s as though bass resolution and clarity as reproduced through a loudspeaker has finally caught up with the transparency we sometimes hear throughout the rest of the spectrum.