Can Vandy's get along with cats?

Introduce your cat to scratching posts. Place scratching posts in multiple areas of your home. This should greatly decrease the chances that your cat will use your speakers.
Declawing a cat is absolutely taboo, cruel and unacceptable.

1) Most cats would rather scratch a sissal scratching post and one near enough the speakers will get used preferentially.

2) Most cats will avoid things that get them sprayed with a water bottle (while they're actually in the process of doing something undesirable).

3) Grill cloth doesn't cost a lot of money to replace if somehow that fails.

I had 6-7 years of overlap between having my cat (and my sister's cat when she moved in) and speakers with grills without issue.

My cats have coexisted nicely with speakers, one of them going on 19 years now with only one incident. One day while listening to music she just up and decided to jump on top of my speaker. She gave me that look like she knew it was not the right thing to do but did it anyway. I calmly got up, went over and picked her up off the speaker, then gave her a pretty good lecture. For further emphasis I put the water bottle on top of the speaker.

No need to declaw or even change speakers. Cats don't inherently find speakers attractive and they can easily have their attention diverted to other toys that will aid in trimming their nails or giving them some feline pleasure.

Not really good luck!!

Two cats, three dogs, one pair of Vandersteen 1C's. Thirteen years of peaceful co-existence. Never a problem, and the Vandy fabric looks as good as it did the day I brought the speakers home in 1998. And my pets are all healthy, happy, and loving the music.