Thread: Wilson Audio "provenance"

Enjoyed the second video. The first one was a bit precious, though. And I have to say, the bit about how Wilson speakers are rooted in rural Utah towns was pretty hard to take, given that absolutely nobody in those communities can afford any Wilson product. If they took out a 2nd mortgage on their house, they still wouldn't have enough cash to buy most Wilsons. Reduce Wilson's prices to one tenth what they are today, and there would be only a small handful of rural families who could afford the cheapest pair.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with making a super-premium product and charging a super-premium price for it. Wilsons sound amazing, and are built to tolerances probably lower than some nuclear reactors. But don't turn around and try to sell yourself as representative of the common man or rural values or whatever, when you do that. Because, at the end of the day, we're still just talking about loudspeakers, and those rural folks think you'd have to be the world's biggest sucker (and, let's be honest, probably a douchebag) to spend that kind of money on speakers for your stereo.

I say this as somebody who absolutely would buy Wilson speakers if I could afford them. But if Dave Wilson thinks his products express the spirit of rural towns, he's in Marie Antoinette territory.

Trent, there are 6331 millionaires in Utah and plenty of my good Mormon friends own Wilson. My decade old Watt Puppies were purchased used for less than half price. I think if you research Utah you will no doubt see many affluent audiophiles living the dream in the promised land.

Why Utah? Founded by Mormon pioneers, the state, which has been called “a quasi theocracy” by the editor of its largest newspaper, is overwhelmingly white (93 percent) and Mormon (60 percent). Those demographics make for a socially conservative mind meld—no gay marriage, mixed acceptance of women in the workplace—that might seem hostile to the idea-swapping associated with a go-go economy. Mix in a thin coffee-and-booze culture, and you might expect Utah’s economy to be listless as well.

But the opposite is true. Greater Salt Lake City, the 75-mile corridor stretching from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south, has absorbed massive new data centers for eBay, Twitter, and Oracle; splashy new offices for Disney Interactive and EA Sports; and, just last month, a commitment from Adobe—the makers of Flash and Acrobat—to build a thousand-person software-development campus, where the minimum average salary will be $60,000.

Homegrown tech is booming as well. The University of Utah recently tied MIT for creating the most companies out of its patented research: more than 80 since 2005. Provo, home to Brigham Young University, has the most high-growth companies per capita in the country, according to Inc. magazine.

This "new" Utah is the target of Wilson Audio, and yes they are precious.

And yet I'd bet almost any amount of money that the typical rural Utah family is financially about on par with rural families everywhere else in the country. Even your decade old WATT/Puppies would be well beyond their means.

It wasn't my intention to bash Wilson speakers or the people who buy them. Like I said, if I had the money, I'd be among them. But trying to sell the company as rooted in or representative of good ol', hard workin', salt-of-the-earth rural Utahans is, shared Mormonism aside, wrong on the facts and weird as a PR strategy.

Wilson is a company that puts out almost unimaginably well-built products for amazingly wealthy people. They've never apologized for that, before. They shouldn't, now.

The real message is.....most of the speaker greats are now being made in China.

Really? I thought speakers were the one component that were still produced mainly in America and Europe.