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WATT/
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Floorstanding three-way loudspeaker
Made by: Wilson Audio Specialties, Utah, USA
Supplied by: Absolute Sounds Ltd
Telephone: 0208 971 3909
Web: www.wilsonaudio.com; www.absolutesounds.com
Price: £41,998 (standard colours)

LOUDSPEAKER

Wilson Audio The WATT/Puppy
To celebrate a half century of the Wilson Audio family brand, it returns to its founding
and arguably most iconic loudspeaker – The WATT, with bass support from the Puppy!
Review: Ken Kessler Lab: Paul MillerWhether it be cars or guitars,
anniversaries benefit small
manufacturers because theypresent authentic marketing
opportunities. One of these is a reason torelease a special model while
another is to declare one’s
provenance. You can’t fakelongevity, so the real value
is that anniversaries cannot
be ‘made up’ as they arrive
only with the passage oftime. And while it’s hard tobelieve, 2024 marks the firsthalf-century of Utah-based Wilson AudioSpecialties, and the designated birthday
cake is The WATT/Puppy you see here.
Note the use of ‘The’ in the model
name, not WATT/Puppy nor System 9 if
this were to pick up where the series left
off [see ‘A Puppy’s Tale’, right]. It certainly
merits the ‘The’ as in ‘The Connaught’ or‘La Ferrari’ as it’s more emphatic than amere number. Yet neither is it a marketing
conceit because The WATT/Puppy (from£41,998 depending on paint finish) is thebeneficiary of all that has happened at
Wilson in the past 13 years. It’s a careermarker and a returning legend.

WATT/Puppy’, and to maintain the historicalpurity, Wilson even resisted adding ‘flying
buttress’ handles as found on the sidesof the Sasha V – those open wings thatbracket the upper cabinet. Except for thisspeaker, skeletal frames
now define a signaturedetail for all of Wilson’s
multiple enclosure models.
Without them, the look will
trigger nostalgic warmth inolder audiophiles.
In standard form, The
WATT/Puppy can be dressedin one of five colours, with a choice of silveror black fittings. For an extra fee, another17 luxurious hues are available. Ultimately
there’s the premium ‘Pearl’ selection of 11
colours for still more outlay. While only the‘The W/P isclearly a true
descendant of
the original’

get the look
An analogy is apt here. I recall once being
told that if you took apart the first Porsche
911 – turning 60 this month – and thelatest iteration, there wouldn’t be one
interchangeable component, not even thebadge. I cite this because the 25-year-longsaga of WATT/Puppy, from 1986 to 2011,
isn’t dissimilar save for a hiatus ending withthis model. From the very first WATT to the
WATT/Puppy System 8 there was a constantevolution in materials, components,
crossover design and aesthetics.
With its return in 2024, the analogy
with Porsche continues visually – if you
stand The WATT/Puppy next to the original[see inset picture, right], you’ll immediately
recognise it as a true descendant. Althoughdiffering dimensionally from the original,
The WATT/Puppy shares the same look.
In reincarnating the WATT/Puppy to ‘The

‘The WATT/Puppy
benefits from all that’s
happened at Wilson
over the past 13 years’customer knows how important looks are
relative to price, the ‘Pearl’ colours bringthe cost of The WATT/Puppy a bit too close
to that of the Sasha V [HFN Sep ’23] in its
standard form.

Tune in or Trade-Up?
This raises an important point. The WATT/
Puppy fits between the SabrinaX [HFN Dec’20] and the Sasha V, clearly bettering
the former, as it should. The £17,000
difference between The WATT/Puppy and

A PUPPY’s TALE
It’s easy to forget Wilson AudioSpecialties started out as a recordlabel, releasing audiophile LPs andCDs during the genre’s most fertile
era. As founder Dave Wilson wasrecording live in assorted venues, heneeded a portable speaker to meet
his standards in soundstaging anddetail retrieval. The resultant WATT (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot) had a truncatedpyramid enclosure and sloped baffle that aligned the drivers’ acoustic centres.
It soon emerged that friends and colleagues wanted them, too, where smaller
speakers would suffice, so a commercial version was introduced at the Las Vegas
CES in January 1986. The WATT bettered other small monitors, including the BBC
LS3/5A, for maximum SPLs and bass, but the latter remained restricted. The first‘fix’ was the now-forgotten ‘2pi Steradian Beard’, a panel attached to the front
lower edge of the WATT to augment the bass, in use with the Gibraltar stand.
In 1989, the easier-to-drive Series 2 WATT arrived, but it was swiftly followed
in 1990 by the first Puppy woofer enclosure. The latter endowed the systemwith bass flat to a claimed 40Hz, while the top-mounted WATT, now housing mid
and treble, could be tilted for improved time alignment. The WATT/Puppy Series
5 was launched in May 1994, and was graced with X-material for the Puppy
baffles. (‘Series 4’ was skipped out of respect to Eastern cultures.)
Five years later, the System 6 (as opposed to Series 6) was introduced withthe same drivers but an increase in cabinet volume and a revised crossover.
System 7 featured new drivers from Scan-Speak, in place of those from Dynaudio,
while the System 8 of 2006-7, with its M-material panels and inverted dome
tweeter from the MAXX, evolved into the first Sasha (2009), the latter’s W/Psuffix acknowledging its roots.

Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution | www.hifinews.co.uk

www.hifinews.co.uk | Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution

LOUDSPEAKER
the Sasha V, though, is a sharp taste of
the Law of Diminishing Returns.
It’s because The WATT/Puppy is sotruly proficient at recreating soundstage,
detail, textures and air that, to justify
the move up to the Sasha V requires
a set of conditions beyond access toa bigger bank account. These would
include a larger room, the most revealing
sources and amplifiers, and a set of ears
so gilded they can discern the actual
make of strings on Buddy Holly’s Fender
Stratocaster. And the plectrum.

cabinet shuffle
Yes, The WATT/Puppy is that good, eventhough the Sasha V necessarily has a tadmore low frequency extension [see PM’s
Lab Report, p49] and finer upper module
adjustments for tighter time alignment.
The siblings therefore also present alesson in loudspeaker design because
the drive units in The WATT/Puppy are
identical to those found in the Sasha V[see boxout, below]. It seems, then, that

RIGHT: The WATT’s 25mm doped-silk dome
tweeter, with rear wave attenuator, wasunveiled in the Alexx V and is married here
to Wilson’s 178mm ‘QuadraMag’ pulp/
composite mid driver and dual 203mm
stiffened-pulp, reflex-loaded woofers

the raison d’être for the Sasha V’s added
premium, post-The WATT/Puppy, is the
deployment of larger cabinetry.
At this point, you can imagine how
this is going to be a tough review
to undertake, even though my own
experience includes at least five of the
WATT/Puppy incarnations, including the‘Beard/Gibraltar’ and two of the Sashas.
What makes this so challenging is that
we’re dealing as much with comparing
cabinet volume as with anything else.
Daryl Wilson describes the path
which, in reductio, he placed the same
drivers in The WATT/Puppy’s reduced
enclosure [see interview sidebar, p47].
The progress in available materials since
the WATT/Puppy System 8 is as crucial

THE WATT/PUPPY vs SASHA V
When one realises that The WATT’s
25mm doped-silk dome tweeter and
178mm ‘QuadraMag’ pulp midrange– and the Puppy’s 203mm stiffenedpulp, reflex-loaded woofers – are thesame as those in the Sasha V, albeit
in smaller enclosures, the question
must be asked: is it simply a Sasha V‘Mini-Me’? First, we need to examine
Wilson Audio’s design evolution
since the WATT/Puppy System 8ceased production in 2011.
Among the developments thatled from the System 8 to Sashas W/P,
DAW [HFN Mar ’19] and ultimately
V, is the Convergent Synergy Carbon(CSC) tweeter, with its carbon-fibre
rear-wave chamber, introduced in
the Alexx V [HFN Jan ’22]. Integrating
the CSC tweeter with the midrange
and woofers was key in transforming
the Sasha DAW into today’s Sasha V.
In both the Sasha V and The Watt/
Puppy, this CSC tweeter is married
to the AlNiCo/QuadraMag midrange
driver previously available only in
the Chronosonic XVX, Alexx V andthe Alexia V [HFN Jan ’23]. Alsoin common, The WATT/Puppy isconstructed with the latest versionsof X-Material for the enclosures andbracing, S-Material for the midrange
baffle, and V-Material for the top of
the Puppy, serving as the ‘vibrationsink interface’ for the WATT.

It’s worth comparing thedimensions of the Sasha V with The
WATT/Puppy so we can picture thedifference in scale. Without spikes,
the Sasha V occupies 1145x368x
608mm (hwd) while The WATT/
Puppy pulls back to 1050x305x
474mm (hwd). Also, a Sasha V weighs
111kg while each WATT/Puppy tips
the scales at a svelte 73kg.
Having established that thedrivers in The WATT/Puppy areexactly the same as those in
the Sasha V, the bass drivers, inparticular, are working into a
reduced cabinet volume and arereflex-loaded via a smaller, rearfiring port. This has necessitatedan adjustment to the bass/mid
crossover and to the tuning of theport [see PM’s Lab Report, p49].
Also, the first Wilson Audio
product to use its custom-madecopper capacitor, wound in-house byits ‘RelCap’ division, was the Sasha
V. The WATT/Puppy uses a versionof this copper cap in the tweeter
section of the crossover that iseven more refined – all because thecapacitor’s development coincidedwith that of The WATT/Puppy.
By way of confirmation, CEO Daryl
Wilson describes The WATT/Puppy
as ‘a distilled and more compact
version of a Sasha V’. So it’s official!

Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution | www.hifinews.co.uk

to the evolution as the changes indrive units. It’s all about trickle-down
technology: S-Material, as used for The
WATT’s baffle, was first introduced anddeveloped for the Sasha W/P, which
arrived just as the System 8 was retired.
‘It was the same with V-Material’,says Daryl, ‘which was developed for
the XVX and was not available when
the System 8 was being created.
Even X-Material, used for all internal
bracing and external enclosurematerial, has been refined since
we last worked on a WATT/Puppy
platform. The combinationof materials we use for The
WATT/Puppy yields quieter,more damped and controlled,
sonically rich enclosures’.
Every detail had benefitted
from some change, whether
it was the incorporation ofthe ‘Acoustic Diode’ spiking
system or the completely
reimagined crossover model
that’s a far cry
from what wasavailable in2011. Even theslope of the top
module’s baffle
has changed, notleast because
the new speaker
allows angling of the head
unit. Like its predecessors,
setup involves toe-in, but also
microscopically adjusting the
top module’s angle, which
was not part of the earlier
models’ installation regime.
One final nicety is that therod handle on the rear of the
WATT, which David Wilson
installed on the original
speaker to help him transport
it to recording sessions, hasbeen re-styled so that it canbe grasped securely andcomfortably at any angle.

it was like compared to the preceding
WATT/Puppy System 8. He maintainedthat The WATT/Puppy outperformed
the System 8 in every area, from low
frequency extension and slam tosoundstage depth and width. He also
spoke of greater midrange ‘bloom’. Of
course, Daryl is proud of his new baby,
but could this new speaker system truly
deliver on all of his promises?
I sat down to hear Willy DeVille’s‘Assassin Of Love’ [Polydor 887 312-2/
POCD904 CD single] in anticipationof some of the most impressive bass
to the west of Kodo drumming. It had
served me in good stead through all
those generations of WATT/Puppys. The
heir to the line shook me with bottom
octaves so solid, so controlled and sopowerful that it almost sounded like the
CD had been remastered.

octave overload
Of course, scale and bass aren’t
the only criteria for determining a
speaker’s capabilities.
For some, they’re noteven among the fourof five most important,eg, I’m a midband andsoundstage obsessive. But
the weight, the presence
and lastly the vocals,
notable for DeVille’s gruff
textures, immediately undermined
what I recalled of the early versions.
The WATT/Puppy’s retrieval of bottom
octave information was at a level I
expected of speakers at least 50% larger– disconcerting enough. What I did not
expect was focus I thought was theprovince of small monitors.
It then occurred to me that what
I was listening to was an advanced
interpretation of a small monitor (as it
was back in the 1980s and for which it
remains the template), if augmented
with a woofer system that did notcompromise the midrange and treble.
Blind Faith’s staggering, lone, selftitled LP [Atco SD33-304B], released
in 1969, would do more to reveal thecapabilities of the top module than thewoofer enclosure, and so it proved.
Autoharp and violin on ‘Sea Of
Joy’, Steve Winwood’s distinctive,
nasal vocals, Ginger Baker’s odd,
trashy cymbals – the clarity andfreedom of coloration proved to bea testimony of sorts, a reminder of
why this speaker exists, for here wasa studio monitor with levels of detailWilson Sr required of the first WATT
of 1984. The transparency via vinyl‘The lack ofcoloration
was its own
testimony’true grip
Before taking delivery of The
WATT/Puppy, I’d talked briefly
to Daryl about his impression
not of The WATT/Puppy side-byside with the Sasha V, but what
LEFT: The permutations of Wilson’s‘Standard’, ‘Upgrade’ and ‘Premium
Pearl’ colours with its six grille fabrics andblack/silver hardware options make this ahighly customisable design! It’s seen here in a
Bentley Blue finish with Parchment Grey grillewww.hifinews.co.uk | Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution

Daryl wilson

ABOVE: Cables from the main crossover pass up through the top of the Puppy, behind the WATT’s
alloy rear handle, and terminated in gold-plated 4mm/spade posts. The WATT’s height is adjustable
at the rear, pivoting on two fixed front spikes for fine adjustment of overall time alignment

approached open-reel tape, but with a key
improvement that can only be attributed
to Wilson Jr: no hyper-detail to render the
loudspeaker clinical-sounding.

serenely silky
It’s a devilish balance, that of retrieving all
the low-level detail, extreme treble clarity,
brisk transient attack and smooth decay,
while avoiding aggression or any potential
for listener fatigue. I always
employed valve amps
throughout my 35-plus
years as a Wilson user, but
was always aware that the
speakers could tip into the‘hot treble’ zone, especiallyon the end of solid-state
amps. Not so in the Daryl
Wilson era, which meant that D’Agostino
and Constellation amplifiers soundedalmost as cuddly as my tweaked Radfords.
To test this further, I dug out a classic
example of what went wrong in studios inthe mid-1970s-to-1980s, when everything
seemed to have treble turned up to 11.
Arguably the greatest country vocalist ofthat period, Juice Newton has a set of pipes
to rank with Mesdames Ronstadt, Cline,
and Wynette, and nothing comes close to

the drama of ‘Break It To Me Gently’ fromGreatest Hits (And More) [Capitol CDP 746489 2 CD]. Equally, its upper frequencies
can rival the annoyance of a smoke alarm.
Whatever sorcery has served Daryl
Wilson so well, it’s evident here in that itchanged the occasionally glassy to theserenely silky. The transparency and detailof The WATT/Puppy had already done
justice to Willy DeVille’s vocals, which are
diametrically opposed
to Juice’s, so the speakerrightly favoured neither.
In the way it treated suchdivergent voices with bothequanimity and authority,the ‘studio monitor’ statusof the original WATT was
retained even in its alterego as a high-end audiophile speaker. I
cannot name many studio monitors which
enter civilian life with such poise.

‘The slam andsizzle werereproducedwith command’

Daryl Wilson, CEO of Wilson AudioSpecialties, is immersed in the familybusiness – he’s pictured below inthe mid-’80s in the garage where hisfather, David Wilson, built the first
WATT. The burning question? We
asked Daryl, aside from the overall
shape, does anything remain fromthe last-generation WATT/Puppy 8?
‘I’ve wanted to resurrect this
iconic design for almost a decade’,says Daryl. ‘My father and I talked
about it quite a bit, but at that time
there weren’t enough new elements
to justify reintroducing it. However,since my father passed in 2018,
there have been a lot of individualcomponent advancements.’
Daryl cites the cabinet materials,
the in-house developed and custommade crossover components,
internal cabling, driver tech,connection points, advanced shapeand design analysis. ‘The only thingcommon to The WATT/Puppy Series
8 would be the driver sizes [25mmtweeter, 178mm mid, 2x200mm
woofers] and the echo of its shape.’
Described as ‘truly and thoroughly
remastered’, the back of The WATT/
Puppy has a beautifully engraved
50th Anniversary medallion attachedto the resistor panel, albeit limited
to the 2024 production. ‘The WATT/
Puppys built after 2024 will have thecommemorative medallion replacedwith something else’, says Daryl.
In practice, The WATT/Puppy
supplants the retired Yvette [HFN Feb’17] and is the smallest model withan adjustable mid/treble head unit.
Below it is the sole single-chassis
floorstanding speaker, the SabrinaX[HFN Dec ’20], which does not offer
adjustable time alignment.

tool you can trust
This is the reason why makers of bothstudio and domestic monitors, from PMC
to Tannoy to JBL, run two separate ranges.
Now, I am not suggesting for a momentthat pro recording studios should invest
in The WATT/Puppy system. Rather, I am
www.hifinews.co.uk | Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution

Lab
reportWILSON AUDIO THE WATT/PUPPY
LEFT: Rear view shows lower-to-upper
cabinet connections, rear-firing port,
midrange vent and access to ‘protection’resistors. The crossover is in the main
cabinet and does not support bi-wiringof the bass drum, the sizzle of thecymbals were reproduced withsuch command that I was finding it
difficult to imagine more.
What sold me, however,
was a raw performance from along-forgotten various artists
LP sampler from 1973, Let It
Rock [Atlantic K40455]. After ablistering ‘Back In The USA’ by
MC5, all scorching guitars withgreater speed than The Ramones
could muster, I sat back to savour
Magic Dick’s harmonica lead on J.
Geils Band’s ‘Pack Fair And Square’.
Arguably the greatest harp solo
in history, it soars while testing
clarity and transient crispness.
It was, to put it succinctly, as inthe-room as I have ever heard in
50-plus years of loving it.

The (new) WATT/Puppy’s response [Graph 1, below] has manyof the features already seen in the Alexia V [HFN Jan ’23] andSasha V [HFN Sep ’23] – including the modes associated withthe 178mm mid driver at 500Hz-1kHz and step at 3.5kHz oncethe 25mm CSC tweeter gets into it stride. These modes are also
reflected in the CSD waterfall [Graph 2] along with the familiar
low-level treble resonance at 14kHz. Nevertheless the overall
response of this smaller cabinet is more uniform – errors are
reduced by ~1dB over the Sasha V to just ±2.6dB and ±2.7dB,
respectively, here – and the pair-matching is a superb 0.25dB(200Hz-20kHz) if we ignore a short-lived departure to 0.6dB at~3.5kHz. Toeing in by 15o further flattens the presence/treble[grey trace, Graph 1] while the grilles are relatively benign [blue].
The reduced cabinet volume means bass distortion is a little
higher (0.5%/100Hz/90dB SPL at 1m versus 0.25% for the Sasha V)
and extension slightly reduced. Nevertheless, while the two
203mm pulp woofers have a symmetrical but rather ‘peaky’
response (84Hz here rather than the lower 74Hz of the SashaV) they are augmented by the much broader 20-80Hz (–3dB)
tuning of the rear reflex port to deliver a still impressive,
diffraction-corrected 38Hz (–6dB re. 200Hz). Like the Sasha V,
the WATT/Puppy is a fairly tough load but the smaller newcomer
still bests its bigger sibling with a 1.5dB advantage in sensitivity– 91.8dB vs. 90.3dB/1kHz, smashing its 89dB rating. Wilson’s
specified minimum 2.87ohm/86Hz impedance is broadly met at
2.6ohm/97Hz while the modest +25o/–47o phase angles in thebass region contribute to a minimum 1.2ohm EPDR at 77Hz. PM

grand master
Ultimately, there’s a parallel here
I simply have to declare. It is
no secret that Daryl Wilson has
taken everything that he learnedat the feet of the maestro, hisfather David A Wilson, and used
this knowledge not solely as alegacy but as a foundation for
his own innate abilities. Just as
every WATT/Puppy improved on its
predecessor, so has Daryl moved
beyond his father’s achievements
to become one of the pre-eminent
speaker designers of the 21st
century. The evidence? The WATT/
Puppy is a masterpiece.
saying that they would find the
speaker as useful an analytical toolas I rate it for end-user pleasure.

harping on
Despite the way The WATT/Puppy
dealt with both the delicate andthe majestic, it was the latterthat proved the most enticing.
The speaker was proving to be
the opposite of the diminutive
LS3/5A, for example, to which I turnfor savouring vocals. Thus I was
driven to playing the whole of Led
Zeppelin II [Atlantic SD8236], withwhich John Bonham’s juggernaut
drumming came ascloseasthis to
the Sasha V. The slam, the dryness

HI-FI NEWS VERDICT
Even with but a few dozen hours
burn-in, The WATT/Puppychanged everything. It delivered
in a reduced package 95% of the
Sasha V’s brilliance, a fraction
barely noticeable unless the room
size and peripherals can exploit
it. This speaker defies the eye.
What you hear surely cannot
come from so compact a system?
It is Wilson’s new sweet spot. So
it is with genuine awe I state: thisis my final reference.

Sound Quality: 93%
0

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

- 100

ABOVE: Response inc. nearfield summed drivers/port[green], freefield corrected to 1m at 2.83V [yellow],
ultrasonic [pink]. L, black; R, red; ±15o, grey; grille, blue

0 dB
-7
0.0

-14
1.3

-21
2.7

-28
-35
200

500

1k

2k

5k
10k
Frequency in Hz >>20k

4.0msec
60kHz

ABOVE: A resonance at the top of the mid unit’s range(3kHz) is joined by a short-lived treble mode (14kHz)

HI-FI NEWS SPECIFICATIONS
Sensitivity (SPL/1m/2.83V – 1kHz/Mean/IEC)

91.8dB / 91.4dB / 89.5dB

Impedance modulus: minimum& maximum (20Hz–20kHz)

2.6ohm @ 97Hz
10.4ohm @ 57Hz

Impedance phase: minimum& maximum (20Hz–20kHz)–47o @ 68Hz
+29o @ 728Hz

Pair matching/Resp. error (200Hz–20kHz)

0.6dB/ ±2.6dB/±2.7dB

LF/HF extension (–6dB ref 200Hz/10kHz)

38Hz / 31.1kHz/33.1kHz

THD 100Hz/1kHz/10kHz (for 90dB SPL/1m)

0.5% / 0.1% / 0.4%

Dimensions (HWD) / Weight (each)

1050x305x474mm / 73kg

www.hifinews.co.uk | Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution