Wilson Benesch recently travelled to South East Asia to join our official import partner in Vietnam. The Audio Hanoi team expertly curated five exhibition spaces, each with unique experiences of high end audio at the AV Show Hanoi 2022.
In the Wilson Benesch room, Audio Hanoi presented the new Omnium loudspeaker to the Vietnamese audiophile fraternity for the very first time. Finished in Burr Walnut natural wood finishing from our premium line of finishes and adorned with Gold Isobaric Drive System finishing, the Omnium looked the part.
The Omnium was driven by power and pre-amplification from the Greek manufacturer Pilium. 2x Pilium 300w Poseidon Monoblock amplifiers, with the fully balanced Ares Preamplifier. Pilium produces solid-state amplifiers that deliver very fast transients and attack, incredibly clean across the audio band, whilst always remaining natural and musical. Wilson Benesch deploys a minimalist crossover design in all of our loudspeakers and in this respect it can be acknowledged that Pilium appreciates the importance of maintaining signal purity, avoiding the use of multiple resistors in their volume control on the Ares Preamplifier and placing just one single resistor in the signal pathway. The system delivered digital content throughout the weekend via the Métronome AQWO Transport that played SACD/CD content.
The 3-day AV Show Hanoi 2022 was a well attended, well organised and very enjoyable high end audio exhibition. Our thanks to Audio Hanoi and their team for curating this event.
Wilson Benesch Owners System Designs
In the days following the exhibition, Wilson Benesch visited numerous Wilson Benesch owners across Vietnam.
It is always a pleasure to meet Wilson Benesch owners in any country, it provides the opportunity for sharing music and passion for sound. But this proved to be a quite remarkable journey through 7 varied and often totally different approaches to building top level audio systems. Each sounded superb in its own way, delivering something different, something beguiling and almost intoxicating in its own way. The passion and enthusiasm for sound and music were as strong in each owner that I had the pleasure to meet.
Ultimately the two biggest impressions and lasting thoughts from the visits were as follows.
First, central to the design and development of Wilson Benesch loudspeakers, there has been a pursuit of simplicity within our crossover designs. The end goal is to maintain signal integrity as much as possible and deliver natural sound from our products. It is why the midrange drive unit in most of our products is directly amplifier coupled with zero crossover components in the signal pathway. This reductive approach to crossover design is only possible because of how Wilson Benesch is structured as a business. The vertical alignment of Design & Development, Manufacturing and in turn Production means that a closed loop exists where all things interrelate with one another. As such Wilson Benesch has complete control over the design of the enclosure, the drive unit technology and the crossover, with no reliance or constraints imposed by a third party OEM supplier. What was most evident from experiencing each customer’s system was that all of them sounded quite different and had their own unique strength and quality that appeared to the owner. This underlined that despite two customers owning the same loudspeaker or a loudspeaker from the same family of products of the same brand, the customers choice of electronics that powered the loudspeaker was entirely evident in the listening experience – ergo the integrity of the signal from the electronics had been delivered faithfully, not translated to a “Wilson Benesch Sound”.
Second, incredible high end audio sound experiences can be created in very small spaces. Three of the rooms that we visited were less than 4m wide and 6m long. These were compact listening rooms with challenging acoustic problems. And yet these systems sounded superb. Looking at the photos in this post it can be seen that two of these systems were built around the Eminence loudspeaker. It was an absolutely gripping and enthralling experience listening to the Eminence in each of these rooms. In each instance, this was possible because the room had been acoustic treatments had been considered and experimented with to control the acoustic problems in the space and the outcome was impressive. A great example of how with the appropriate attention to detail, investment of time and budget and if required the support of an expert, the appropriate acoustic environment can be created for almost any system in any given room.
Photos of the Vietnam AV Show and of each Wilson Benesch customer system can be viewed in the gallery below.
System 1: Eminence Loudspeaker with CH Precision M10 Monoblock Power Amplifiers + L10 Preamplifier
System 2: Omnium Loudspeaker with Pilium Poseidon Monoblock Power Amplifiers + Ares Preamplifier
System 3: Eminence Loudspeaker with German Physic Emperor Extreme Monoblock Power Amplifiers + Emperor Preamplifier
System 4: Resolution Loudspeaker with CH Precision A1 Monoblock Power Amplifiers + L1 Preamplifier
System 5: Endeavour Loudspeaker with Pilium Leonidas Integrated Power Amplifier
System 6: Eminence Loudspeaker with Nagra HD Monoblock Power Amplifiers + Nagra HD Preamplifier
System 7: Cardinal Loudspeaker with Pilium Poseidon Monoblock Power Amplifiers + Ares Preamplifier
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