Watt Puppy 8's cost more than a Prius for a few reasons:
A. The typical profit structure in the high end is much higher than it is for automobiles.
i.e. most high end audio products have a 30-40% profit at the retail end. Most car
dealers are lucky to make 10% on a car.
B. Wilson is not as large of a company as TOYOTA, therfore their R&D, materials cost
and labor cost are much higher than TOYOTA
C. Wilson is a specialty mfr., TOYOTA is a mass market mfr. You are comparing
Vandersteen to Ferrari here
D. A lot of the cost of the Watt Puppy is in the cabinet construction and hand assembly.
Wilson's composite materials that they use eats up a lot of machining time. It's like
machining titanium instead of aluminum. Wilson also takes great care to hand match
every component to .1% tolerance as well as the drivers. This way they also have
carefully matched replacement drivers should you need a replacement tweeter 10
years from now.
E. Why does a replacement battery set for a Prius cost 8000 dollars? A battery for my laptop
only costs 100? Why does the transmission in a Prius cost 6500 when a new trans for
my 325i only cost 1500? I know a lot of people that have owned their Prius's for a couple
of years and the repair bills have been horrendous. I know people that have owned Wilson
speakers for ten years with no issues.
F. Having more than one family member in the car business (three of them work for TOYOTA)
it's common knowledge in the industry that Toyota built the Prius as a loss leader to build
brand share in the hybrid market, which I applaud them for, but a Prius should really cost about
45k. Because Toyota is such a huge company that sells millions of Camry's every year, they
can afford to take the hit.
G. When you buy a pair of Watt Puppies, your Wilson dealer will come out and spend a day or
two setting up your speakers so that you are happy with them. You don't get that with a Prius.
You don't even get that with a Porsche!
So in the end, most of the gear in the high end is like buying a Ferrari or Aston Martin. None of these guys make this stuff in huge enough scale to offer it cheap. That's the way it has always been. Considering almost all products in the high end have a similar markup structure built in to them, it goes up the scale pretty linearly.
And for what it's worth, I don't own Wilson speakers, nor do they advertise in my magazine. But I do know that they build an excellent product to extremely high standards and they do a better job with customer and dealer service/support than almost anyone in the industry. That costs money.
I've known a number of people that own Wilson and I have never heard them complain that they were ripped off with their purchase.
Don't know what else to tell you there....
