Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy
Not much is formally documented about the Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy in the Archive's files. There is no surviving spec sheet, price list or production-year record. What the record does have is a solid run of period press. Audio magazine covered the model twice, in February 1996 and again in January 2000, and those reviews supply most of what is actually known.
Ken Kessler retold the origin story in Audio (January 2000, p.77). David Wilson's friends and colleagues all but forced him to turn the WATT into a production product after he demonstrated it. It was less costly and more domestically acceptable than the mighty WAMM. The full WATT/Puppy system put the WATT monitor on top of a Puppy bass cabinet, and the pair was treated as one integrated loudspeaker.
The 1996 review described a rarely matched combination of clean sound and high volume. Rock, jazz percussion and massed orchestral passages came through cleanly enough to pick out individual instrument sections (Audio, February 1996, p.59). The same review noted the system handled the full output of a Krell amplifier without complaint, and that its overload behavior was very good when pushed to its limits. Bench measurements in that review found peak input power starting at 360 watts at 20 Hz, rising to 700 watts at 40 Hz, and settling around 450 watts at 80 Hz, across a rated 4-ohm impedance (Audio, February 1996, p.58). The crossover was internal - low-pass for the Puppy woofers, high-pass for the WATT - with a broad overlap in the region from about 125 to 250 Hz (Audio, February 1996, p.55). Wilson also ran a concealed channel between the sections, and specified a special network in the connecting cable to terminate high-frequency reflections.
By the January 2000 review of the WATT/Puppy 6, the design had changed. The WATT still used a 1-inch inverted titanium dome tweeter and a 7-inch polymer cone, while each Puppy carried two 8-inch polymer woofers (Audio, January 2000, p.80). The System 6 also gained a gloss finish, easier-to-use binding posts, and a larger Puppy cabinet that extended bass response down to 23 Hz (Audio, January 2000, p.83). The reviewer found it less aggressive and sweeter on top than the System 5, and judged it a step toward sheer musicality.
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