Vandersteen or not to Vandersteen

I appreciate all the good info, but I am lousy with solder and anything of that sort. I just want a system that is easy to install and then nice to listen to. I am willing to trade less sound quality for less hassle. I am now considering a Rel as my first choice. Of course, Rel is nothing to sneeze at.

What is the input impedance of your current amp? The input for an ARC amp will be 100k usually.
There are two ways to go here. Use the crappy switchable box that comes with the unit(yes you will need an additional pair of cables, buy a decent used pair that you can get your money out of when you no longer need them
if you don't want a spair pair around)untill you settle on which amp you are going to go with, which will give you time to break in the woofer anyway. Lots of amps are 100k by the way. You won't want to make any critical judgemnt too fast, and not untill the woofer has enough time on it.

Secondly just spend the money up front on the 5 x-over that Sdcampbell recomends which puts the price about the same as the REL.This will mean that you are covered for most any change you may make in the future(it is adjustable like the on that comes free with the unit but you will need to decide if you are going to go single ended or balanced). You have a major advantage with the Vandersteen over the REL this way(please REL owners don't take this as a knock)in that you have the true benifits of bi-amping when the low frequencies no longer need to be reproduced by your main speakers or your main amp. If you would like to see a second opinion on this topic go to the Vandersteen site and click on the review page then go to "audio perfectionist" rewiew of the 2Wq.
I have a 2Wq and it has taken some effort to set it up right, but the effort has been well worth it. My system does not sound like there is a sub woofer in it, but I have good deep bass which sounds like it comes from the main speakers. Don't fool yourself into thinking that the REL will be any simpler to set up correctly. All woofer integrations take some effort but when you get it right it will put a smile on your face.
P.S. Scott ment Cap values and not resistor values.

Maxgain makes some excellent additional points (and thanks for the correction about cap values -- I had a "senior moment" while writing).

I often respond on threads about Vandersteen products, and I sometimes feel like others may think I am a "pimp" for the company. However, given that I have been an audiophile for about 40 years, and have owned a LOT of speakers over the years, I think my comments are based on objective experience with Vandy products.

Maxgain makes a comment that I think should be re-iterated: the 2Wq subwoofer does take some additional tweaking / set-up time, but the results are well worth it. If having a sub that enhances the quality of your music reproduction, as well as providing low-frequency HT effects, is important to you, then you will have to spend substantially more than the price of the 2Wq to do better. I've owned several different brands of subs, and listened to many more, and for my money the 2Wq subs is one of the genuine bargains. If you decide to buy the Vandy 2Wq, I strongly urge you to consider having two subs in your system. From my own experience, a stereo pair of 2Wq's yields a VERY significant improvement in audio quality over a single sub.

There have been a number of threads about subwoofers on this forum over the past two years, including several summaries of reviews from audio mags that I submitted. Before you make a final decision about which subs to consider, may I suggest that you look in Audiogon's archives for articles about subwoofers? You might try using the search topic "subwoofer reviews" as a starting point.