Vandersteen 5a battery biased crossovers

I am not sure what caps are used but any high voltage signal path application for caps generally requires high quality caps.

Most speakers use high quality polypropylene caps for the crossover ($5 to $10) as do Vandersteens (I think) - these do not need reforming like electrolytic caps (although like any cap they drift with use with most drift occuring in the first 100 hours). So I am not sure what the battery actually does unless? As for peformance - within a few minutes the capacitors within your speakers should perform optimally so I am not sure the advantage there either. (The rubber surround on the speaker drivers will also ease up after a few minutes each time you power up too and thermal heating of the voice coil will change the way the speaker behaves too - do you have a "block heater" on the driver motor assembly as we Canadians have on our cars? It would be a sensible addition if one is worried about capacitor warm up)

Sono, I have not heard my Vandys with dead batteries, but I have heard Audioquest DBS cables with batteries dead and after a day or so they sound like the cables that "come in the box" .Richard does nothing without due consideration. It is the dielectric he wants to keep constant. The batteries are marked/dated for replacement. Not to insult, but anyone can perform changing them.

Why mess with a good thing...replace the batteries.

Dead batteries in the crossover/filters make a difference. The bass response sheds some "body" or shall I say become somewhat anemic.

In my case, I bought a pair of the Vandersteen 5A's used and immediately placed them in storage for almost 3 years. I recently installed them about 3 weeks ago for the first time and my local dealer mentioned the batteries possibly needed replacement by now. He sold the pair to the original buyer.

Anyways the speakers sounded great from the start so i did not mess with batteries. However, I was chasing down a troublesome grounding hum in my system when I swapped my power conditioners around including power cords. When I finally isolated the culprit, I noticed that my 5As, sounded like the "soul or body" was just not there. I kept checking the bottom to feel if the subs were working. Mind you the bass was still there but just lacked WEIGHT.

Well Lo and behold, I picked up a brand new pair of filters yesterday evening (because I thought the original filters were lost after all these years in storage and I had to order a new set from my dealer) I installed the filters with all settings in the off position in my haste and frankly it just did not feel right. Luckily I was listening to the 2ce's at my dealer that afternoon paired with a GRAAF OTL so I knew this 5A was just MIA.

So I opened the filter, adjusted for my amp and VOILA, the 5A delivered. That was an eye opener. The batteries barely had enough juice after all these years and eventually shut off the filters, hence the anemic sound

The batteries are your typical 9V batteries and did not look difficult to change. I will watch my dealer change the batteries in the filters next week before I put them up for sale here.