All-Time Favorites: Wilson Audio Watt/PuppyAll-Time Favorites Wilson Audio Watt/Puppy

No. 6 Wilson Audio Watt/Puppy

At first this loudspeaker was out of reach for me and my colleagues in Germany. Okay, we could have bought it, but the distributor at the time wasn't keen to hand it over for testing. Buy it? At around 35,000 marks in the early 1990s, that was rather a tall order. The Wilson Audio Watt/Puppy 3 marked the beginning of a long – perhaps the longest – passion for a product and a company philosophy. Later I understood why the distributor didn't want to hand out the speakers to editorial offices left and right. They had incredible, indeed brutal potential, and the smallest mistakes destroyed their performance. You really had to learn how to handle them. A complicated undertaking, but in the end all the effort paid off. Incidentally, it was in a Bochum high-rise, in the apartment of sales rep Rastam Yousefi, that I was first “allowed” to hear the Watt/Puppy. I was electrified from the very first notes. By the suppleness and intensity of the sound. It struck like lightning. At the time I was still working at Stereo in Munich. When I moved to Motor Presse Stuttgart, I took Wilson Audio with me, figuratively and literally. My new colleagues, however, were extremely skeptical about Wilson Audio. I still had my apartment near Landsberg am Lech, and in that house I had set up my own fairly comfortable listening room – with the Watt/Puppy, of course. One evening during my first weeks at “Audio,” two new Stuttgart colleagues, Thomas Brieger and Holger Biermann, decided to drive the roughly 200 kilometers to my place to see my “acoustic hero” for themselves. They heard the Transrotor Quintessenz turntable, the Cello Audio Suite preamp – then as now – and two McIntosh MC 1000 power amps. In short: they had the same experience I'd had in that Bochum high-rise. One of them even asked where I had hidden the huge subwoofer. There wasn't one, of course. The Watt/Puppy variants – the American manufacturer's “volume model,” despite their ever-climbing price – were and remain my favorite. Their successors, by the way, are called Sasha, currently the “V” model. In the picture you can see the Watt/Puppy V, considered the most successful model in the series...

Which loudspeakers have particularly impressed me over the last 30 years? Countless ones. But only very few left a lasting and often formative impression. Objective criteria? There are none – this selection is purely a matter of taste. The order of the favorites, like price and age, is secondary.