Interesting video with Richard Vandersteen talking about his subs

Tim, you nailed it.  It did a few things great. I HAD to use tubes that sounded like tubes, lmao.  I became good friends with the owner.  Irony is that he sold Vandy's, but didn't love them.  I wish I had been more up to date at that point, but I wasn't.  I almost wish I had gotten the later Spendors as they were very musical.  He also had the Apogee's.

This turn brings me back!  In the early 90’s I switched from Vandersteen 2C’s (which were the speakers that first brought me into the high end) to Proac Supertowers (I believe I was influenced by a review by Jack English...). Those speakers brought more information, which the 2C’s somewhat lacked, and they were challenging speakers to tame!  In fact, too challenging, as I ended up trading them out within a year for a more forgiving speaker.  Darker tubes, definitely were the only way to go!

jbrrp1,

The Proac Supertower wasn't actually a bad design. I just couldn't get past that hard, sterile, titanium dome MB tweeter.

Guys, the reason he sold them to me for 1000 was to get rid of them for the newer version with the fabric tweeter.  That was a very good speaker.  After a few years my surrounds fried (all of the older Proacs had that problem).  I got a full set of them from the distributor, but they were for the newer towers. We also got the newer tweeters along with the proper crossovers.  We wired them up with MIT internal cables and Cardas silver solder if I recall correctly.  New WBT binding posts also. Basically we rebuilt the speakers and they were special after that.  I still had to use tubes on them though.  They disappeared just like all his speakers did.  The sound was MUCH closer to his reference speaker sound after we installed those drivers and crossovers.  The wire made a huge difference. 

I had my preamp and mono blocks rewired as well as upgrading all the caps and resistors, lol.  Great designs taken to another level, but these Vandy's just crush the ProAcs.  I will say that the new ProAc ribbons are the smoothest ribbon tweeters I've heard so far.  They just seem to really lack in any deep bass. Even the 40's don't do it for me compared to the Steen's (even my old Treo's)

Ct. From your last post, I now understand why you kept them so long. Can't remember the exact model number/letter, but I think it was the models 3.5 and 3.6 Proacs that sounded absolutely wonderful to me. A very fine loudspeaker!