Fine Tuning Vandersteen 5s An offer gone missing

I was under the impression that Mr. Vandersteen recommended the use of warble tones to help setup his line of speakers due to their time/phase corrected design. If this is the case, does that mean that the Rives CD would not fit the bill?

Warble tones are useful for two reasons, and apply equally well to any type of speaker. At low frequencies you lesson the chance of measuring directly on top of a specific room resonance and overcorrecting in that region. At high frequencies you lesson the chance of measuring directly on top of a specific comb filtering narrow peak or valley and again overcorrecting. While the phenomina are different, the result is the same.

Using pink noise for measurement can also be useful because it excites all room resonances simultaneously, including those harmonics which add together at any specific frequency. If you have an RTA, play a single bass note down around 63 hz on your test disk, and observe the resulting frequency distribution on the RTA. It will be bell shaped from 31.5 to several hundred hz, due to a combination of the instrument harmonics and the room resonances that are excited.

If you can afford Vandersteen 5's you can afford True Audio, True RTA, the full suite is $99 and is an accurate professional level tool.

Microphone and preamp for computer interface $200

Then you can tune the speaker properly from bass to treble

mre2007 - Rives will work, a cd from Vandersteen with 11 frequencies matched to the 11 potentiometers makes the job easier. Also, time alignment goes out the window for the bottom firing bass (low frequency = long wavelength = even if the bass was time aligned you couldn't tell it).

I am lucky enough to live near Zargon and he was kind enough to fine tune my 5As. The improvement was like getting new speakers.