Vandersteen Model 7: has anyone heard?

Tdaudio -
Your response is well taken. My "alive" might be another persons "bright." Regardless, Vandersteen makes some of the best speakers on the market.
Your system is enviable. Love those amps!
Covet your turntable! What cartridges do you run with it?

Thanks Aronsss, I am using two ZYX Universe carts. Both picked up used on Audiogon. One in a Triplanar and the other in TW Acustic Raven 10.5. One Universe has north of 1500 hours so I am starting to look for something else although it seems to be going strong.

After reading about the virtues of MM carts, I recently placed an old Shure V15 vmr in service in the Raven arm and it was a step back. It had not been played in a few years but I gave it several disks to loosen up. Maybe the Triplanar would have been a better match.

I echo the many comments made by others regarding the 7's. When I visited Audio Connection on Saturday for the Vandersteen event, the electronics were mostly Aesthetix - Rhea, Calypso, Atlas, with Audio Research CD player and I don't know what kind of turntable.

I completely agree with the others who heard the 7s at Audio Connection. The ARC CD Player was the Ref-8; the Turntable was a Basis with a Graham Phantom arm. I think John said that the cart. was a Clearaudio Goldfinger. In his talk, Richard said that they intentionally had chosen electronics that were significantly less expensive than what you'd expect to hear driving speakers of that price. It certainly didn't matter in terms of what we heard.

I haven't heard the 7, but as a former 5a owner, these are the things that I hope the 7 would address:
Narrow sweetspot (particularly in the vertical plane)
Bass anomalies with certain recordings
Lack of midbass energy
Lack of dynamics and slam with some types of music
These are issues I had with my 5a's.