Vandersteen Speakers.. Are All Other Speaker Makers Doing It Wrong ?

+1 for Wilson Benesch & "tcutter" summed it up perfectly.  W-B is not the only awesome speaker line on the planet but worth exploring.

So, no Vandersteen is not the only speaker company to do it right.

Cheers

listening to Vandersteen speakers it is evident Richard Vandersteen just doesn't get PRAT. Temporally challenged to a tee..

Look, I am not up to speed on Vandersteen speakers, but I owned them. Generally speaking there are 2 primary camps which further divide from their primary camps into vast nbers of camps. You have I want pleasing types, who no matter how poorly something was mastered, they want to be able to enjoy it. Then there is the I want what it sounds like camp. Neither is wrong, music is subjective!

Generally speaking, and historically speaking Vandersteen has been at the pinnacle of the it should all sound pleasent camp, IMO. They have always made fine speakers. They sound much like my speakers were I to toss a quilt over the tweeters and midrange drivers, I don’t know if this is still the case.. I have done modifications to their speakers, but it took driver substitution to make impressive differences, IME, of reportedly defunct speakers. I am told that they have radically changed, and now no longer Barry the details. That would require a paradigm shift, and on the face of it seems unlikely.

KEF was the first company that I am aware of to design phase and time aligned speakers. B&W, Thiel, and Vandersteen followed suit. Of course there are others too, but these were the big players a few years ago

Of these, Vandersteen alone dampened the sound. B&W 801Ms with the redesigned crossover and critical capacitors bypassed is an awesome speaker. Thiels were pretty well respected, but with bright gear can be ear bleaders, the downside of accuracy is that all your gear must be neutral or you’re going to have issues, which wasn’t an issue with Vandersteens, hence many loved the no muss no fuss that was Vandersteens. I don’t know what it the case today, though I suspect it is more of the same.

Best bet, listen for yourself! If you like it, enjoy it, listening is a personal experience.

One more thing, they are only perfectly time aligned at a particular distance. Greater or lesser distances distort that, and they should be such at a frequency in the midrange of each driver. IOW, the highest and lowest frequencies of a particular driver will not be perfectly aligned as different frequencies travel at different speeds, and so it goes. This is less critical than it sounds because of this issue.

Yes he is from an engineering standpoint and if you want to hear an exact reproduction of the sound.  Now if you can hear the difference that's another story.

Most of this information I learned was from the link below and listening to them.

Phase correct (crossovers and setback tweeter from midrange and woofer), minimal baffles, individual enclosures, single order crossovers, minimizing the speaker structures distortion, and the cabinets distortion are all things Vandersteen did first, most in the 1970's.  Others are adopting his approach, individual enclosures, minimal baffles, setback tweet, midrange, to woofer to create better phase correctness, and still enclosures to reduce distortion.  All these Vandersteen has been doing for 1-2 decades before others.  Only thing others haven't agreed to completely is phase correctness and "perfect piston".  Though most speaker designers have agreed a stiff cone is important to prevent distortion; this would be accepting "prefect piston" as true.  Sounds like they are agreeing with Vandersteen.

No, I don't work for the company, got most of my information from the below link and I listened to them, Vandersteen Quattro Wood CT.  I consider these to be on similar price range and performance to that of the Wilson WATT Puppies (some thing I've loved and wanted for years).  However, Vandersteen puts more into their speakers.  I checked out the technical evaluation criteria and there test level performance is as good or better.  I heard them and though what many would consider dark I thought was more realistic.  Many designers make bright speakers because that's what draws us in; it did for me have a pair of B&W 802's and have wanted Wilson WATT Puppies for decades.  It's always impressive to hear the symbol's, chimes, or other highs but in real life without electronics can you really hear that stuff?  No.  And with it, at a concert, do you hear that?  Not often if at all.

It's all subjective but for me my next will be a pair of Vandersteen's.

SoundStage-Richard-Vandersteen.pdf (troelsgravesen.dk)