Revel Salon vs Vandersteen 5A

ivrobinson,

My reference to the Revel's being an "accurate" speaker refers to the type of sound it has, very flat and lifeless when I have heard it. You ask then can an inaccurate speaker sound good? That depends, how are you measuring?

Take the Revel and the Vandy 5A, both have a measured frequency response of about +-2 dbs from the 30-20,000 hz range when tested by quasi-anechoic means, and are by all means "accurate" speakers. Sit down and listen to them and you will hear two very different sounding speakers. Even variations of a couple of db's can significantly change how a speaker sound. Now add into that driver construction (different materials create their own sounds and resonances), phase response, and dispersion characteristics, and you can have two speakers that appear nearly identical on paper, but are far different in practice.

Measurements give us an idea of what a product sounds like, but we don't understand all the parameters that make up what we hear. The measurements are a good starting point. Speak with any audio designer (speakers included) and they will tell you subjective listening and voicing is a key factor in their designing of the product.

If you believe that measurements tell you everything, you should immediately run out and buy the cheapest CD/DVD player you can get, a cheap 100 watt receiver, and find the flattest measuring speakers that you can. It will save you a fortune and under that standard you will have a great system. For the rest of us, we found out a long time ago that one amplifier that puts out only .01% distortion can sound entirely different than another.

I love VAC amps, own the Model 5 and have a sister.

No, Raquel, I'm not thinking like back in the '70s... I'm thinking that the tube amp community needs to get off of the bogus negative feedback, high-order distortion, you-can't measure-it / you-don't-know-what-to-measure bs. Paraphrasing Einstein in this context is just silly; this is audio, not dark matter or the cosmological constant we're talking about. It just might be that the DHT 300B is indeed the best amp around, but I don't know since I haven't heard it. (And I probably won't, since I'm not interested in spending $28K on an amp.) I'm just questioning the arguments for why they must be better. I've heard some medium-nice tube amps (VTL, ARC) in one of my systems and, frankly, I never heard a difference (I was running Krells then), other than I could hear more hiss during idling from the Legacy Focus speakers I was using at the time. It's not that I think tube amps are so bad, I think the good ones are just as good for some speakers, I just can't hear the "it's alive" effect, and, frankly, I don't think it exists.

We completely agree on the Harmon International comments. The last time I bought a new Levinson component the CT facility was still open, and I doubt I'd be a customer again.

Mcreyn, give me a break. +/- 2db is almost certainly audible, -80db of distortion almost certainly isn't. Speaker vendors have their own unproven theories, like phase and time coherence. To quote Richard V, "they just sound better". Well, of course they do. :) But then why do speakers that don't have phase and time coherence sound good too? Or am I imagining that too? (Like Wilson, for example.)

Not to belabor the point, but an ARC amp likely would not sound so different, as ARC uses copious amounts of global feedback in its amp circuits and pentodes for output tubes (ARC = great preamps and boring amps). The VAC Renaissance amps have a feedback dial that allows the user to select up to seven decibels of global feedback - it's amazing to hear the amp go from pristine clarity and openness (0 decibels) to ... Bryston (7 db.). I not joking - I owned a 4B ST for years and know what the thing sounds like.

Being perfectly honest, I never fully fell in love with my Salons - not to initiate another joust, but I rarely warm to speakers that use high-order crossovers. There are advantages and disadvantages to both high-order and first-order designs, but I can't get past the phase shift with a speaker that uses a fourth-order crossover. The Salons are very accomplished for what they are and I could probably live with them again if I had to, but they weren't my ideal speaker.