$27,500 for whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat???

@jon_5912, you've got me thinking now.

Anyone living in the West who has travelled much must have inevitably encountered people living in such dire poverty that they would make the poorest of us here seem affluent in comparison.

Against such a background $27,000 for a loudspeaker paint job does seem a trifle obscene, and not to mention sonically quite unecessary.

My entire system, including music must have cost me somewhere around $5k. Outside a couple of audiophile friends I personally don't know anyone who has spent anything near that amount on audio.

Having said that, it's probably my only comparitive extravagance in life. That's how much music means to me.

Probably also explains why the price/performance ratio of audio products matters so much to me.

So you'll never see me paying $27k for a Wilson loudspeaker paintjob, however unlikely that I will ever be in the position to do so. Even if I was, and my accountant advised it as a tax avoidance measure I'd much rather simply give the money away. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93performance_ratio

Why are you even discussing it. For the super rich, they’ll get a kick out of telling friends over dinner at Masa they ordered it in the 27k paint option.

My brand new car cost me 25K and it came with a gorgeous black paint job.  When you think of the thousands of parts that make up the car, 27K for just a paint job is insane.  Then again, I am not some oil sheik living in Dubai.

The paint job on my vpi aries 1 ,says it all about what paint might cost .

WILSON makes some very expensive speakers, they advertise them as a cost-no-object product, and one of the best manufacturers in the world.
I'm sure the paint job involves many hours of prep work and their employees (in Utah) make a very good wage. For me, the contradiction comes from their stating how well the present line performs, while they are already working on re-designing them at the factory for the next upgrade. The availability of "newer technology", or some new cabinet material is already in the works, and so you're "obligated" to come by after 3-4 years and audition the V-2, then the 3, and so on. This all happens way too quickly while other companies stick by their designs for much longer intervals. You may want to know what was so wrong with the original SOTA speaker you paid so much for. As for the Chronosonic, I would have put the bass-speakers in a separate inclosure and re-work the Tower-of-Pizza design so it looks like it "might" look half-as-good as the original WAMM did.