Vandersteen Quatro Wood CT Setup Questions

Jaclyn will mail you all the spike shoes you need, they are reasonable $$$$ imo
good advice on the 1hz sweep...

load the top of the antique chest up with ramdom stuff....natural diffuser......love the room.....

I've tried using Soular Energy to set the bass level, but I don't seem to be able to discern anything with this music.  I found it easier just to put on some familiar orchestral music with a lot of bass drum and then adjust the bass level until the bass thwacks are satisfying but not thumpy and the overall tonality is not hard.

As for the tilt, I found it easier to get a chair (Ekornes Stressless) that puts my ears at the right height and then use a good bubble level to get the speakers as level as possible.

I also replaced the cones and spikes with Soundocity outriggers, which was a huge improvement in stability on my suspended wood flooring + thick carpet.  This does add 1/2 inch to the height, about right for my chair.  The outriggers have limited height adjustability, though.

I also found that doing the bass EQ with the C-weighting is too much bass for my room and my taste.  I use the Radio Shack meter  to set the initial level only, and then use a flat measurement mic (miniDSP UMIK-1) for the EQ.  (I also wrote my own custom RTA to help with the EQ, but that's not the "canonical" way and a probably a story for another day...).

I think if your RTA centers are on the 11 bands vs the normal 1/3 octave that would be somewhat canonical...
the freq bands were based on typical room nodes not octaves

proof is in the sound !

RV uses 4 warble tones per octave, so I use 1/4 octave bands.  A repeating logarithmic sine sweep is played thru the speakers, and digital bandpass filters are used to produce the band levels.  Once you've set the right volume level, the software gives you the 25% target outline for adjusting each band properly.

You could probably do something like this with an off-the-shelf RTA (e.g. the one in REW), but you'd have to track the target levels yourself.

The program is written in Python, uses PyAudio to capture sound input, scipy for the bandpass filters,  and wxpython for the GUI.  This makes it reasonably portable.  I've been meaning to clean up the code and put it up on GitHub. 

I get excellent sounding results, and the EQ process is much faster when you can see the effect on all the bands at once.  But being the author, I'm able to deal with the idiosyncrasies of my own design.  It would take more work to make it generally usable.

Another question. My Audio Research Amp (REF110) has 4, 8 & 16 ohm taps. The Quatro manual says try 4 or 8 ohms. I know that Vandersteens were often demoed at shows using similar ARC amps. Does anyone know what taps RV uses? Any general opinions?