You might expect that David Wilson was born to parents with a deep love for music, which they passed on to him. This was not the case. Wilson's father was an honest, hard-working man who took care of his family. He did not have the good fortune to spend his life's work on something he loved. He provided.
David Wilson was introduced to his life's work one Christmas - at 13 - as he lay in bed, trying to sleep. Sleep would not come, however, because carolers in the neighborhood kept singing, without moving on. Frustrated, he went to his window. There were no singers; a neighbor had placed a Klipsch speaker on his front porch - pouring carols into the night.
This experience so intrigued Dave that he turned to a friend, Don Alley, a young audiophile, to find out more. It was a short trip from there into audio. Like so many young people in that time, Dave's first experiment was a Heathkit amplifier that he assembled himself. He was so excited by the prospect that he rushed headlong into building the amplifier, indulging his passion without the discipline of intellect. Standing back, proudly looking at the finished product, Dave threw the power switch. And in seconds, the house was filled with acrid smoke.
Though he was only an adolescent, Dave learned a lesson that day. You can see the evidence of it in everything he does. He learned the value of the scientific method: the careful process of performing a task one step at a time and recording the results. Today, as Dave listens to changes in a speaker design, he documents each step and records the results. Testing speaker cables, he follows the same steps. Dave saves all his work. Ask him how he chose the binding posts for the original WATT loudspeaker and he will pull out a record of his listening sessions with each post.
After his experience with the Heathkit, Dave proceeded more carefully but with every bit as much passion. And he studied, reading everything he could about audio. He started building speakers. He built a speaker into a window of the Wilson household to explore the infinite baffle concept. This, of course, endeared him to his neighbors. He experimented with enclosures, using a stack of rubber tires as a cabinet - his first modular design?
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Working in his garage and living room in the late Seventies, Dave Wilson constructs a prototype of the state-of-the-art modular "white dwarf" WATT loudspeaker.