”Since the arrival of the Sasha 2/WATCH Dog system, there hasn’t been a visitor from within the industry or reviewing community —or more tellingly, one with no audiophile pretensions at all—who hasn’t been instantly sucked into the musical performance on offer. Everybody gets this system. They get what it’s doing and why what it’s doing is special and worthwhile. It’s an object lesson in just what an audio system—especially a high-end audio system—should do. It’s musically coherent and capable of intimacy and delicacy, real power and scale. It is both honest and communicative. But above and beyond all that, it’s fun and engaging—and occasionally frightening, shocking and not a little scary. It’s all the things that real music is...“

———— Roy Gregory, The Audio Beat

The WATCH Dog is an ultra-high-performance, compact, passive subwoofer. There’s a widespread myth that since subwoofers operate in the low to subsonic frequency range, the sonic quality of the amplifier used to drive them is not critical. Couple that with the fact that FTC-mandated criteria for power amplifier specifications don’t apply to active subwoofers—a loophole which allows manufacturers to wildly inflate performance claims for what are, in many cases (no pun intended) the severely sub-standard amplifiers built into their subwoofers.

When designing the WATCH Dog, special attention was paid to the driver itself. This proprietary twelve-inch woofer was specifically optimized for the two bottom octaves of the audible bandwidth. The driver features a dual spider design, triangulating its geometry (the third variable being the cone’s surround) such that the high-excursion cone can only move pistonically.