Vandersteen 2CE Signature III — video review on YouTube by Steve Guttenberg (1/15/2023)

Yes, the Quatro is the best 'bang for the buck' speaker, not only in the Vandy line up, but in regards to all the speakers out there.

A pair of Treo's with Sub 3's will get you to a Quatro. -Maybe even better, as you can position the Sub 3's to optimize bass output, though the graphic equalizer should minimize this.

I, too, am drawn to the MBL's like a moth to a flame. I am still waiting to find a pair of 121's at the right price. However, John Rutan told me that they don't scale well, and you might find out that the piano is way over sized in imaging.

For me, I just love the design, as well as the omni-directional concept.

B

gdnrbob

Roger that on the MBLs, though the "affordable one", which is $14k, is a bit shy on bass. I've heard the Linkwitz, which is similar, at a show and the soundstage was almost 360 degrees. Eerie! You have to bring them WAY out in the room though, and I am not able to do that. 

The Larsen 9 interests me too. It's not an MBL, but the way the drivers fire makes them much more room placement friendly, and create a wall of sound. This review is good:
LARSEN 9 review
"If I may borrow one of HP’s phrases once more, this is a speaker that should be heard by every student of the audio arts. The idea of using boundary placement to reduce the influence of the listening room on the sound has been around for a long time and tried in various ways. But it remains rather unusual. All you have to do is look through audio magazines to see that almost all contemporary speakers are really quite a lot alike in their general nature. Some are better than others, and we all have our favorites according to various theories and listening experiences. But there is a considerable sense of “déjà vu all over again.” The Larsens are members of a family, too, in some sense. But their family of boundary-placement speakers is a very much smaller one. The Larsens offer a unique sound that to my ears is unusually true to actual music, and they are unusual, too, in their ease of effective placement in the room. They offer their unique sound with a truly minimal disturbance of domestic life. Whether their unique sound is for you is something you need to experience for yourself. You will have not heard anything else much like the sound—except of course in live music."

It would be pretty nice to see some frequency response graphs.
The only ones I know of are few from Stereophile many years back, and “Erin’s Audio Corner” measured an older 2C ~ a year ago.

As for other speakers; not seeing the step function response, or a step function response which is at odds with how the sound pressure hit the microphone… just bugs me. And therefore it excludes most speakers I look at, or consider looking at.
(I kinda like them to be technically correct as an opening bid.)
^That^ excludes a lot of (on the surface) seemingly nice sounding speakers pretty quickly.

Steve gives them an excellent rating

I’d expect nothing less.
But since he rarely gives a negative review, it is a low bar for entry, and doesn’t tell us much. If he said something negative it would make people sit up like the dead in a horror film.

Whether or not you think Vandersteen models are getting brighter will depend on how far you go back with the company. I bought my first pair in 1996 and my last pair in 2014, my 4th, and they were voiced differently to my ears. I always suspected it was finally a reaction to the reviews.

I got mine a dozen year earlier… so I go back further.

I would expect that they would gradually get more neutral over time from available XO parts, an upgraded XO design, and likely drivers that have less ringing and resonances.
And it is possible that the early days they could have been a bit “toned down” for SS equipment that was overly bright. (Dunno, but it could be possible??)

So being as they were on the warm side earlier (40+ years ago), then anything more towards neutral would be viewed as brighter in comparison today. And maybe less so over a 25 year span.

"If he said something negative it would make people sit up like the dead in a horror film."

LOL!

I remember that some criticized Vandersteen speakers for being "rolled off" in the highs.  To me, I owned three pair of the 2s over the years, they were natural sounding.

But about that time in the '70s there was increased demand for MC cartridges, many of which had a rising high end in their response.  So I suspect that increased, sometimes false, sense of detail from a brighter high end became a popular norm.  Then any speaker which did not match that characteristic was criticized by many folks.