A day at Axpona 2011: Legacy Audio Whisper XD

Quite a few people have recommended the Whisper XD to me. They’re full range. They’re dipole. They throw a huge wall of sound. And they sound great.

The last time I heard them, the bass was dipole too — that is, it was pretty weak. Other things against them: a mandatory 24bit/96kHz analog-to-digital-to-analog conversion in the required off-board crossover and then there’s the whole bi- or tri-amping thing.

Well, with the XD, there’s no requirement for anything other than a single amp as the big 15″ woofers are now driven by integrated bass amps. But the crossover is still 96kHz. Which means all those nice 192kHz files you sprung for … get down-rezzed? That’s a shame.

Anyway, the bass was tight. Everything seemed to hang well. The sound, and the quality of the sound, was … potent.

I get the feeling, from the setup and the distances between everything, that the XD was meant for a large room. Sure, there’s a DSP and all so you can do quite a bit of tweaking, but … no. It’s big and meant to be that way. All in all, I quite liked it. Not my favorite at the show, but certainly one of the best sounding speakers at Axpona.




About Scot Hull 1063 Articles
Scot started all this back in 2009. He is currently the Publisher here at PTA, the Publisher at The Occasional Magazine, and the Executive Producer at The Occasional Podcast. There are way too many words about him over on the Contributors page.