Heart = stolen

By Anonymous -

Wilson Benesch A.C.T. C60 Limited Edition


Grip is a term often associated with the bigger drivers of great speakers. Usually we’re talking about the low end, but something about the word “grip” implies a type of bass definition that is likely affected by a treble or midrange transient element. After all, music is not a set of test tones, but a wild soup of transients and concurrent complex sound sources.

It’s so complex, we need to describe it with general “feel” words like grip and bounce, or with more common visual descriptors like dark and bright.


Grip for me means excellent transients. It means I can listen to my favorite solo bass album and reap the musicality buried within the wash of deep dark tones.

The Wilson Benesch A.C.T. C60 Limited Edition speakers we just got in and which I just tested are absolutely huge (another visual metaphor) in sound and the bass grip rivals or betters anything I have ever, ever heard.

Going further, the midrange “grip” is uncanny. I guess in this case I mean the same thing in a slightly different way. Listening to a bowed double bass on these gives me the shivers. That’s as real as I’ve ever heard.

The one thing about these speakers that everyone at TMR seems to want to remark on is the off-axis sound quality. I’m standing here typing, between and actually behind the speakers, and I can pinpoint every image behind my head in the stereo soundstage. TMR Marketing and IT guy Chad just came up to say they sound fantastic from the TMR front office. Andy came over from shipping to hear more of what already was sounding really great.

I love that. In fact, it’s one of my favorite qualities of high end speakers. Really, any speakers. I and most of you realistically can’t be in the sweet spot for hours and hours at a time, and it’s a real shame to keep a beautiful system dormant most of the time.

The beautiful black carbon-finished Wilson Benesch are quite up there in price, and they should be. Wilson Sophia 3, you may have just slid a little on the list of speakers that stole my heart. I think these might be better.

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