Wilson Audio Specialties considers the Yvette ($25,500/pair) to be the replacement model for the Sophia Series 3. I would argue that the Yvette is an entirely different animal. There are obvious similarities between the Yvette and Sophia. Each is a floorstanding, three-driver, three-way design. Each comprises a single box with a separate internal chamber for each driver. The Sophia’s woofer and midrange chambers are ported; the Yvette’s are respectively ported and vented. The two models are about the same size and, from the back, look a lot alike.
There are equally obvious differences. The Sophia looks like two boxes, the Yvette like three. The Sophia Series 3 ($22,500/pair when last available) was the smallest, simplest, least-expensive floorstander Wilson then offered, and was designed to be most buyers’ first Wilson speaker. Now that slot in Wilson’s line is filled by the Sabrina ($16,500/pair), not the Yvette.
What’s not obvious, and makes the Sophia and Yvette different animals, is that they were designed to meet different goals. The Sophia was intended from the start to be user-friendly, more forgiving, and easier to love than Wilson’s other speakers. It embodied the Wilson DNA, but only where it aligned with the overall goal. Wilson hit the nail on the head—the Sophia was a huge success, bringing a large new population into the Wilson fold, and eventually became, as Wilson says, “a cult favorite.” As erstwhile Stereophile writer Paul Bolin once told me, “Brian, the Sophia is a wonderful speaker.”
The Yvette, on the other hand, is based on the same philosophy, and begins with the same design goals, as its larger siblings: the elimination of cabinet vibrations, and the precise alignment of its drivers’ positions so that their outputs all reach the listener’s ears at precisely the same time.
Enter the Yvette
When Wilson Audio’s Peter McGrath and I opened the Yvettes’ crates, I expected to see speakers that looked like Sophias. I didn’t, and at first I was stunned. When my brain rebooted, it informed me that I was looking at a smaller, more graceful version of the Alexandria XLF. There was no trace of the Sophia’s squat, R2-D2 boxiness. The Yvette is tall, slender, and aggressively angular in a way that obviously aims the drivers at the listener. Love it or hate it, there’s no artifice in the Yvette’s shape. It looked exactly like what it is: a stack of boxes designed and arranged to provide the best possible sound. Throw in the beyond-spectacular build quality and drop-dead-gorgeous finish, and the Yvette is a Wilson speaker through and through.
A bit of thought and a look at the Wilson timeline explained why I saw little connection between the Sophia and the Yvette. Wilson has always been great at using the technologies developed and the knowledge gained in designing and building a speaker into later models. In the case of the Yvette, the technologies were generated in a series of development programs involving speakers with multiple, individually adjustable cabinets. For example, the Yvette’s drive-units comprise a 1″ silk-dome tweeter, a 7″ midrange unit with a cellulose/paper pulp composite cone, and a 10″ paper-pulp-cone woofer, all originally developed for earlier models. The new tweeter and midrange drivers, for example, were developed for separate enclosures mounted so that their baffles were at different angles to the speaker’s vertical axis. To accomplish this, the Yvette has to look like three boxes instead of one or two, No artifice, remember?
The Yvette’s appearance also reflects the changes in Wilson’s cabinet design that began when they started using a lab-grade laser interferometer to characterize cabinet resonances and their relationship to changes in design and engineering variables. This more precise measuring technique has led them to alter the cabinets’ internal structures, in Wilson’s proprietary X-Material construction medium, now in its fourth generation, and, most visibly, in more aggressively time-aligned enclosures. Put it all together and voilà—the Yvette looks more like an Alexandria XLF than a Sophia.
Setup
Beginning with the new speakers in the same positions my Sophias had occupied, Peter McGrath spent a few hours figuring out where the Yvettes needed to be: 10′ from my listening position, a little less than 7′ apart, about 24″ from each sidewall lined with LP shelves, and with their front baffles 49″ from a ¾-height concrete-block wall behind them, and 107″ from the structural wall behind that. When I sat to listen, my ears were 39″ above the floor, and 3–4″ below the Yvettes’ tweeters.
When I returned to my listening room the next morning, I reviewed McGrath’s setup with fresh ears. I tried moving each Yvette ½” in each direction, but they sounded worse every time. I moved them back to where McGrath had left them.
Listening
A speaker’s frequency response is like the color of a bedroom’s walls. It may or may not matter to you, or it may turn out to be a significant element of the speaker’s overall sound, but it’s unavoidable. It’s what you hear first, so it’s best to just get it out of the way before trying to talk about how the Yvettes really sounded.
The first thing I heard with the Yvettes was a bottom end that had more impact and extension than I’d ever heard in my room. Any doubt I may have had was dispelled in dramatic fashion a few albums later, the first time I heard Jennifer Warnes sing “First, We Take Manhattan,” from her Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (LP, Cypress 661 111-1) on the Yvettes. The word First was punctuated by a clear, powerful, superbly detailed low bass note I swear I’d never heard before. We’ll see what John Atkinson’s measurements tell us, but I’d guess that in my room, driven by my VTL Ichiban amps, the Yvettes’ bottom end was good down to maybe 40Hz, with still-audible contributions down into the 30–40Hz range. In any event, bottom-end sounds had a realistic level of impact, with superb resolution of detail and definition of pitch.
The Yvettes’ midrange was superb in every way, but a few things especially caught my attention. One was a feeling of overall solidity to, well, everything. Another was that I was hearing more clarity and detail, but without the music’s flow being disturbed, which other components that reveal greater-than-usual levels of detail have often done in my system.
The biggest thing, however, was a level and clarity of impact much closer to live music than I’d heard before. For this aspect of the Yvette’s sound alone, a lot of albums went from good to great. One that went from great to out of this world was Fingering, a compilation of two 1981 recording sessions that brought together pianist Monty Alexander, double bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Shelly Manne (LP, West Coast Jazz Today LA27-1013). This album has always sounded great, but because it’s so hard to reproduce the impact of an acoustic piano or a drum kit, it was never quite there. The Yvettes had me yelling “Now this is what drums sound like!” and “Now this is what a piano sounds like!” Over and over.
A few times, I found myself puzzling over apparent response irregularities. For example, there occasionally seemed to be a little too much contrast between the killer low bass and the upper-bass/lower-midrange region, something that might suggest a peak in the former or a slight dip in the latter. At other times, I wondered if the Yvettes might have been rolling off the highs a little—but this usually changed when I moved my head.
What was it about the Yvettes?
Never had listening to recorded music been as involving, rewarding, and flat-out magical as it was through the Wilson Yvettes. Never had my system sounded so good. The Yvettes were doing something different from what I was used to hearing, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. When I finally did, I realized how simple and obvious it was—and that I hadn’t ever heard it before.
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Wilson Audio Specialties
2233 Mountain Vista Lane
Provo, UT 84606
(801) 377-2233
www.wilsonaudio.com
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