Overview
These are one of the industry’s longest running series of speakers, the WATT/Puppy. As the “first born” from the series, Wilson Audio really set the benchmark for its later generations and the industry really, for what a reference floorstanding speakers can and should sound. Although the WATT was designed to be a reference monitor speaker and to be paired with a subwoofer (of another brand), Wilson Audio subsequently added their in-house designed subwoofer to go under it to give them a full range sound, better matchup and a much needed bass uplift that the WATT was a bit short off. This eventually gave rise to the very familiar WATT/Puppy speaker systems we saw over the next two decades.
The WATT on its own is a pretty hefty monitor speaker at 63lbs. As a comparison, the upper module of the Sasha weighs 30lbs (but is constructed with better materials). The pair you see here has the wood panel sides which gives it a half inch wider width – approx 12″. Depth is 16.5″ and height is 13.5″. Frequency response is 58 Hz to 18 kHz with a nominal impedance of 4 ohm and a sensitivity of 91dB. Adding the Puppy extended the LF response down to 28Hz with the upper roll off at 125Hz. Each subwoofer uses two 8.5″ fast responding woofers and weighs about 165lbs each. Standing 24″ tall, 11.3″ wide and 16.5″ deep, the PUPPY can also double up as speaker stands for the WATTs. Nominal impedance and sensitivity matches the WATT at 4 ohm and 91dB. There are two speaker wire inputs on the back of the subwoofer which you can utilize – one using the internal crossover with a pair of MIT MH-750 jumpers connecting the WATT and the other where you are running an external crossover and just feeding the Puppy LF and running full range on the WATT (you don’t need to jumper the WATT and Puppy together in this latter setup).
Room placement is a necessary exercise to have the speakers find the sweet spot of its soundstage. So spend some time going through the manual (copy) positioning the speakers in your room. Once you have found the best spot in the room for them, you will be richly rewarded with its confident, fast and punchy sound. Mids were transparent, richly textured with the highs clean and detailed. These first version of the WATT/Puppy series have become somewhat collectible because they are relatively inexpensive now and for the price, really delivers a lot of music for the money. It is not uncommon to find WATT/Puppy owners of later models reminiscing the time they owned these speakers in the past and got them on this WP journey. The speakers were re-foamed previously and just had new diffraction pads installed. Some wear spots on the cloth grille covers and a line of holes on one cover. A set of foam covers are also included. Local pickup from our store preferred but if shipping is required, they will be shipped strapped on a pallet.
