”Loudspeakers designed for near-wall placement have come and gone over the years, offering different combinations of strengths. That the Duette Series 2 handily beats every one I’ve heard in terms of spatial performance will be germane to some; as far as I’m concerned, the more important consideration is the Duette 2’s overall musicality—their color, their clarity, their balance, and their ability to involve me as a listener, very much regardless of where they stand in the room. Space is valuable indeed, but musical pleasure is even more so—and on that count, the newest Duette looms large. Highly recommended.“
————Art Dudley, Stereophile
Duette Series 2 - Design
Duette is a unique product in the audio world: a loudspeaker engineered to provide state of the art audiophile performance in installations typically anathema to good sound, namely when the speaker must be placed near a wall, either on stands or in a bookshelf or cabinet. Now Duette Series 2 further refines and perfects that objective, with features such as a new stand with an integrated crossover, new cabinet design and bracing for better resonance control, and tweeter technology derived from Alexia. The designers and engineers responsible for Duette Series 2 illustrate these features in this in-depth video introduction.
Drivers
Duette Series 2 benefits from the myriad technical innovations introduced at Wilson Audio since the introduction of the original Duette over six years ago. For instance, the new tweeter utilizes the rear wave damping technology developed for the Wilson Convergent Synergy tweeter first employed in Alexandria XLF and subsequently in Alexia.
Custom Platform
Based on feedback from how our customers were actually using Duette, with Series 2 we decided to forgo the original’s freestanding option and focus on a speaker designed solely for near-boundary installations. Conventional audiophile wisdom holds that placing a loudspeaker near-wall or in a bookshelf inevitably compromises performance. Our determination, however, was to demonstrate that near-boundary placement need not engender sonic compromise. Duette Series 2 is engineered to provide similar levels of soundstage depth and detail, harmonic expression, and dynamic contrast as our floorstanding speakers.
Duette Series 2 Technical Specifications
Drivers
Woofer
8 inches (20.32 cm)
Tweeter
1 inch (2.54 cm)
Enclosures & Materials
Enclosure
Rear Ported, X- and S-Materia
Measurements
Sensitivity
92 dB @ 1W @ 1 meter @1 kHz
Nominal Impedance
4 ohms/minimum 4.35 ohms @ 160 Hz
Minimum Amplifier Power
20 watts per channel
Frequency Response
33 Hz—21 kHz +/- 3 dB Room Average Response [RAR]