the history of the magnum opus

In the late seventies, Dave Wilson began experimenting with adjustable modular arrays. Empirical listening combined with careful measurements revealed that the ability to adjust the loudspeaker’s drivers within the time domain—specifically as it related to aligning the leading edge transients of each of the individual drivers—was critically important.

He realized that even tiny errors in the alignment of the drivers in relationship to the listener caused obvious sound-quality degradation. Through the late seventies and into the dawn of the eighties, he continued to explore these ideas, as well as modify and evolve his loudspeaker prototype.

During this time, Dave applied for and acquired a patent for adjustable-propagation-delay loudspeaker arrays. More importantly, he continued to develop and refine his proprietary method for the accurate measurement of time-domain deviations.

By 1981, his hard work had culminated in the form of his first assault on the state-of- the-art of believable music reproduction. He called his new loudspeaker the Wilson Audio Modular Monitor—the WAMM.

Dave and Sheryl Lee took out a small business loan to fund the first production unit of the WAMM, and by November of that year, had secured their first dealer, Garland Audio in San Jose, California.

Priced at $30,000 (including its matching subwoofers), it was hardly a given that the WAMM would be a commercial success, but a few months later they had sold four pairs. And by April of 1982, Dave quit his day job at Cutter Laboratories to devote himself full time to Wilson Audio.

The WAMM continued to be a viable product, (although it was the WATT/Puppy that ultimately established the company as successful enterprise). Over the next 20 years the WAMM underwent numerous revisions while its fundamental shape and structure remained the same.

By 2003, with Series 7, the price of the WAMM (which always included the cost of Dave Wilson himself doing the initial speaker set up) had risen to $225,000.

Wilson Audio had just released the Alexandria X-1 at $125,000 and the handwriting was on the wall: given all the materials and design advances that had taken place in the intervening years, the Alexandria was objectively a better loudspeaker. So the difficult decision was made to discontinue the WAMM.

It was a decision not only difficult for the designer to make, but it saddened dealers and distributors as well, particularly in Asia, where the WAMM had found some of its most dedicated owners.

So, not surprisingly, there was almost immediately pressure to create a “new WAMM”. Dave knew that if such a thing were to happen, it couldn’t just be an update of the original. It would have to be what motivated him in the first place—the quest to look forward, not back, with a totally new assault on the state-of-the art.

By 2012, Dave’s son Daryl had proven his bona fides as a speaker designer, and with the ability to share those responsibilities, Dave was ready to begin sketching and imagining what that new WAMM would be.

Everything was on the table; the constraints weren’t schedule, or money, but only what was possible. New drivers, new architecture, a consuming horological obsession—meaning both the watchmaker’s art and the scientist’s measure of time as it relates to musical perception in the brain.

It took four years in the end. The WAMM Master Chronosonic was officially released at the end of 2016.

When asked why he did it, Dave replied with characteristic understatement: “Frankly, I designed the WAMM Master Chronosonic for me as a tool, and as a thing of beauty. It was never designed as a product; I intended to build a limited number of them for friends of Wilson who chose to acquire them."

“You, noble Art, in how many grey hours, when life’s mad tumult wraps around me, have you kindled my heart to warm love, have you transported me into a better world, transported into a better world!

To my mind, this is what Dave Wilson has accomplished with the WAMM Master Chronosonic.”

Jacob Heilbrunn, paraphrasing the lyrics of Franz Schubert’s An die Musik in The Absolute Sound