I find the driver placement choices very interesting. With a cost-no-object design, and now that Alon is placing larger drivers above the midrange driver and the tweeter, he must have considered a full D'Appolito configuration (e.g., Rockport Arrakis, VSA Ultra 11) or at least an M-T-M configuration (e.g., YG Sonja) but affirmatively rejected it. I wonder why?
Ime one of the tradeoffs between MTM and TM (or in this case, MT) configurations is the two slightly different arrival times from the midrange drivers in the MTM configuration, if the listener is not at the correct height. Ime this can result in a slight loss of clarity relative to the TM or MT configurations.
As for the tweeter being below the 6" midrange, which in turn is below the dual 11" lower midrange drivers, imo that makes a lot of sense from a psychoacoustic standpoint. The ear tends to mistake high frequency sounds as coming from a greater height than they actually do, and tends to mistake lower frequency sounds as coming from lower than they actually do. If I recall correctly, the ear is pretty good at judging the height of sound sources from maybe 1.5 kHz to maybe 4 or 5 kHz. (Also the ear's ability to even get an impression of the height of a sound source diminishes rapidly at bass frequencies.)
So the ear is likely to "mistake" the highs as from coming from a little bit higher up than they really do, i.e. like about at the height of the midrange cone, and likely to mistake the lows (most of which presumably come from the twin 11" cones) as coming from a bit lower than they actually do... i.e. perhaps about the height of the midrange cone. My guess is that M9 sounds unusually coherent from fairly close range, relative to most big speakers, which (along with the adjustable subwoofer section) might make it feasible in smaller rooms than its Wilson rival.
ponder who chooses to actually buy a particular $750k speaker? someone who has his/her/their interior designer accessorize the room......mostly. not us mouth-breathing mono-brows with open top gear cases sitting around, listening in our underwear...
walking into a really high class residence, would you be more impressed with the WAMM or the M9? i think the M9 wins going away. and an M9 sitting in a dealer showroom will be a magnet.
Than makes a lot of sense, though I can't help but wonder why they didn't figure out a way to have the binding posts down near the floor. I'm thinking, run a hidden umbilical accessible via a removeable panel on the back of the mid/tweet module.