Wilson Audio

You might expect that David Wilson was born to parents with a deep love for music, which they passed on to him. This was not the case. Wilson’s father was an honest, hard-working man who took care of his family. He did not have the good fortune to spend his life’s work on something he loved. He provided.

David Wilson was introduced to his life’s work one Christmas – at 13 – as he lay in bed, trying to sleep. Sleep would not come, however, because carolers in the neighborhood kept singing, without moving on. Frustrated, he went to his window. There were no singers; a neighbor had placed a Klipsch speaker on his front porch – pouring carols into the night.

This experience so intrigued Dave that he turned to a friend, Don Alley, a young audiophile, to find out more. It was a short trip from there into audio. Like so many young people in that time, Dave’s first experiment was a Heathkit amplifier that he assembled himself. He was so excited by the prospect that he rushed headlong into building the amplifier, indulging his passion without the discipline of intellect. Standing back, proudly looking at the finished product, Dave threw the power switch. And in seconds, the house was filled with acrid smoke.

Though he was only an adolescent, Dave learned a lesson that day. You can see the evidence of it in everything he does. He learned the value of the scientific method: the careful process of performing a task one step at a time and recording the results. Today, as Dave listens to changes in a speaker design, he documents each step and records the results. Testing speaker cables, he follows the same steps. Dave saves all his work. Ask him how he chose the binding posts for the original WATT loudspeaker and he will pull out a record of his listening sessions with each post.

After his experience with the Heathkit, Dave proceeded more carefully but with every bit as much passion. And he studied, reading everything he could about audio. He started building speakers. He built a speaker into a window of the Wilson household to explore the infinite baffle concept. This, of course, endeared him to his neighbors. He experimented with enclosures, using a stack of rubber tires as a cabinet – his first modular design?

Music became a passion, a need. Instead of following the popular culture of the day – Elvis and The Beatles – he developed a love of classical music. It is bemusing to watch him -perfectly pressed sitting on the floor, legs crossed, conducting the music that is playing over the WAMMs. His eyes closed, a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth – this is passion.

At Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, Dave met the other passion of his life – Sheryl Lee Jamison. In this instance, Dave’s passion and intellect worked in perfect synch.

Sheryl Lee was looking for somebody to transcribe records onto tapes she could send her boyfriend in New Zealand. Sheryl Lee’s cousin, Ty Jamison, told her about his roomate, Dave, who was really into audio. When Dave met her at the door of his apartment, his heart rate went into high RPM. As they talked and he showed her his system, he was calculating just how much time he would have before she “walked out of my life.” The time it would take to transfer a tape was not enough. He reached behind the recorder when she wasn’t looking and snapped the input patch cords. A night of taping was followed by the shocking discovery that there was no music on the tape! It had to be done over. In 1966, they were married.

Even though Dave went into pharmaceutical research, audio was never far from his heart. A look at his 1966 system (see photo) is evidence of obsession. A turntable suspended from Whamm-o sling shot rubber bands? Years later, this concept reappeared in one of the world’s finest turntables, the SME Model 30.

By 1974, Dave had a pair of Dahlquist DQ-10 loudspeakers, which he started modifying (beyond recognition). In 1977, the Wilsons launched the Wilson Recording label with their first release of organist James Welch (Concert).

In the late Seventies, Dave’s research on the speaker that became his flagship – the WAMM – began. Working in his garage and living room, he constructed a prototype of a state-of-the-art modular loudspeaker (see photo). In 1981, David and Sheryl Lee introduced the WAMM at Garland Audio in northern California, and immediately sold two at $28,000 each. They sold five sets of WAMMs that year. Today, they have sold over 50 WAMM systems despite a price tag that now stands at $225,000.

As the Wilsons continued recording (with Sheryl Lee running the business), they discovered that their on-site monitors did not provide accurate information about the recordings. Sheryl Lee, the realist…who paid the bills…, had been urging David to build a smaller, less expensive speaker for the company. He had resisted. The Wilson passion pushes him toward the outer edges of the art. But when his recordings were undermined by the quality of the monitors, he was convinced. And thus was born the WATT, a design that reshaped the high end speaker market.

He built two pairs of WATTs. One – the “white dwarf” – for recording work (see photo) and another, nicely finished, for home use. The second pair went to the 1986 summer CES where, despite its $4,500 price tag, it wowed the crowds. A classic was launched. The WATT’s dedicated woofer, the Puppy, followed in 1988. Suddenly the Wilsons had a major high end audio company. WATT cabinets began to stack up throughout their house and the Wilson children – David III, Kevin, Daryl and Debby became speaker builders.

In 1991 the Wilsons moved their business and family back to Provo, Utah, where Dave and Sheryl Lee first met, and where their success continues. Since then, the business has grown exponentially. Over 12,000 WATTs have been sold. In 1993, they introduced the X-1 Grand SLAMM, a $65,000 state-of-the-art design that took the audio world by storm. Wilson has sold over 400 pairs of the X-1.

Each of these speakers is an exercise in excellence. Within the design parameters of each speaker, Wilson builds the product without compromise. Listening to a Wilson speaker is like reading a score. You will know exactly how the piece was played, and what each instrumental voice has to say. “Revealing,” is the pertinent adjective. Each Wilson design is intensely intellectual. It is difficult to disengage your brain because there is so much information demanding your attention. Passion enters the equation in the speakers’ abilities to reproduce the dynamic scale of music. Short of a horn, no speaker is as dynamic as a Wilson.