David Wilson and his wife Sheryl Lee started Wilson Audio in 1974, out of their home in Marin County, California. He was a recording engineer first — Wilson Audiophile Definitive Recordings came in 1977 and still exists — and the loudspeakers grew out of needing something honest enough to monitor his own recordings. The company moved to Provo, Utah in the early 1990s, and it is still there, still privately held, and still run by the family: Daryl Wilson succeeded his father as CEO in 2016. David died in 2018.
Wilson's engineering has one preoccupation, and it is not the drivers. It is the enclosure. The company does not use wood. It formulates its own composite materials and assigns each one a specific job: X-Material for structure and bracing, S-Material where the midrange couples to the baffle, V-Material at the junctions where vibration would otherwise pass between modules. The flagship Autobiography adds H-Material to that set. Damping is applied surgically, at named locations, rather than spread evenly and hoped for.
The second preoccupation is time. Wilson's midrange and tweeter modules sit on an adjustable gantry, and they are meant to be moved — aligned so that the output of every driver arrives at one particular chair in one particular room together. This is the part that cannot be shipped in a box. A Wilson loudspeaker is finished during installation, and it is the reason these speakers are sold the way they are.
The range runs from the TuneTot, developed by Wilson's Special Applications group for rooms that fight back, through Sasha V, Alexia V, and Alexx V, to Chronosonic XVX and Autobiography. The WATT/Puppy returned in 2024, remastered for the company's fiftieth anniversary — built, as Wilson put it, the way Dave Wilson would have built it if he had then what the company has now.
Loudspeakers like these are bought with their amplification — Dan D'Agostino and McIntosh are both here to pair — and finished during installation, which is exactly what a proper demonstration is for.
