Quatro Wood CT VS. 5A's

Great thread. I'm about to upgrade to the Quatro's through Johnny. Still trying to figure out which wood I want. I wanted a Crimson red with tons of metallic flake, but it's way too costly, lol. Do many options Vandersteen offers and all are wonderful.I have cherry Treo's right now, but all the furniture I have made in my listening loft is quarter sawn white oak (highly figured), sapelle and mahogany. You always want an odd number of woods in your room to look right. Since the sapele is similar to mahogany, that gives me the option to do a different species of wood.

Russ, the nice thing is that you seem to have a great dealer to help you out with everything. Johnny, thanks for clearing up the rear firing tweeter for us. I always wanted a switch to turn the wife on or off, lol.

Johnny R ... I don't understand your explanation about using a rear firing tweeter. Stan's question seems reasonable.

I thought the main technical underpinning of Vandy speakers is that they use time coherent drivers. If a tweeter is firing backwards, doesn't that undermine the time coherence of the treble viz the front firing tweeter, ... aside from creating more sonic reflections?

Just askin' a question.

BIF

Guys, It's spoken about in the owners manual. It says that using the rear tweeter adds 100% distortion, because the front tweeter has reproduced all of the info in the recording. In over damped rooms one has 2 options. 1) play the main tweeter louder but then the first arival (most important) info is skewed and no longer an acurate representation of what was on the recording. 2) use a rear tweeter that is adjustable in amplitude and high-pass frequency to add a small amount of energy into the reverbarent field.

Richard believes the second option is better in over damped rooms because it preserves the direct sound as recorded. It is very rare that this should be used but the Model 5 in its day was his flagship and if this feature helped offer a better balance in 1 out of 100 system it belonged. The same is now true of the Model Seven. It is important to note that the best option is to fix the acoustics of the room and turn the rear tweeter off.

Tom, the 7 carbon tweeter looks different than the carbon tweeters in the 5a Carbon and the Quatro CT. For one thing, the latter two have a phase plug and look just like the Vifa ceramic-coated metal domes. My guess is the 7 uses a true "C sandwich" (like a radome), but the 5a and the Quatro use either a monolithic carbon dome or he coats the metal dome with one or two layers of carbon pre-preg, and then cures it.

In any case, what I'd like to know is how the 5a Carbon and 7 compare in high frequency, and whether the $1500 for the CT in the Treo is really a sonic improvement or just an expensive black coating on the regular metal dome tweeter.

on the question of tweeters from a how are they made point of questioning just call Richard - he answers the phone....
Cant say I have heard all three side by side in same room w same front end. The 5 a Carbons currently for sale on Agon seem like a deal.
I know some differences between 5 a carbon and 7 is grading...but not sure about tweeters....next time i call I will ask if I remember.
On the question of measured performance - you will find waterfall plots for each model on website.
pushing the breakup and ringing mode out is a HIGH priority of his a designer.
7's are breaking in nicely....couple a three hundred hours on them and changes are subtle...diffusers at first reflection points R and L at ear level are maybe next.....