How can Wilson Audio speakers sound that good if they are using OEM drivers?

I understand you all. And agree with you. I’m just confused about some companies not pushing boundaries on drivers too.
One thing is to ask another company to develop a driver with a spec. Another is to R&D on drivers, as I understand Wilson Audio does with the their speakers enclosures. Wilson do a kind of crazy R&D with the materials they use on their speaker enclosures. And I love that. But what if they did this also with their drivers?

There seems to be some assumption that a material is just a material regardless of it's manufacture. Correctly manufactured paper has a very high speed of sound while still achieving good damping and stiffness. Wilson used to use a bunch of Focal drivers which are about as far as you can get from paper. Those woven B&W drivers have great damping, but aren't very stiff and they have a rather slow speed of sound. Carbon fiber drivers are extremely stiff and controlling their ringing take carefully consideration. I'm not surprised to see Focal putting flax cones in $10,000 speakers. They have some of the best characteristics of paper and they're stiffer and lighter. Again, old school organic cellulose fibers, just manufactured better. 

OP:
Have you listened to any Wilson speakers? If so, please elaborate.

Kost 

I don’t recall any Wilson with a Focal midrange driver - the first ones used a Seas inverted surround - Focal Kevlar tweeter Dynaudio poly woofers - which maintained through the whole WP thing. 

From the WP5 up the midrange was ScanSpeak 18Wx5x5 and the Focal inverted laminated TI dome. 

Good listening 👂 

Peter

Wilson seemed to love stuffing big Focal W cone woofers in things for a while. All the Alexandria line sports W cone woofers. I'm not terribly surprised Wilson steered clear of Focal mid-range drivers. Focal likes to make mid-range cones rather large and Dave strongly believes in using the smallest driver that will get the job done. One of the reasons I've heard he moved away from Focal tweeters was he couldn't get the to do much below 2000Hz. I have to wonder if part of the reason Wilson moved to paper woofers was because they couldn't get Focal drivers anymore.