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

@patrickdowns You are welcome to visit again any time…. The Treo CT with a Sub3 are sounding sweet with Kuzma CAR-40 on the front end….. even powered with an ancient but highly modified 1961 amplifier……

Fun

Enjoy the music

Jim

Thanks, Jim @tomic601 ! I would love to.

Hi patrickdowns, being a long time critic of Vandersteens it doesn't surprise me that making the treble more accurate bothers many. Every time I listened to the older version they sounded similar to whatever I had IF you tossed a thick towel over the tweeters. Don't be bothered by the detractors, nor me. Beauty is in the ear of the listener! If your happy, it's perfect! Personally I am glad to hear that he is making them more accurate. I have always wanted to like Vandersteens, and perhaps I now would. That's me though, it's you who needs to be happy with them, don't worry about the rest of us!

I have the 2ce Sig1’s. I went from Maggie’s to 2ci & up. The change from 2ce to 2ce Sig added a bit on top.

They are extremely capable speakers, as witnessed through system changes.

I have heard the Larsen’s & prefer mine.

My most recent system change was from Soundsmith Zephyr cart to the Zephyr MkIII ES cart. That alone is a significant upgrade which added a bit on the top.

Being ‘rolled off’ could be due to system…

durkn

Hi— I would be curious to know which Larsens you listened to and what you did and didn’t like, if you care to share. I was mostly interested in the 6.2 and the 8.2 (the latest). From the reviews, they are supposed to be quite a different listening experience than typical front-firing speakers we are mostly used to. They throw up a wall of sound, more like a live performance, it is said.

One dealer said that to me over the phone once he listened to them a lot, he decided that listening to typical front-firing speakers is more "artificial", saying that hearing individual instruments so specifically arrayed within the soundstage is artifice, not like a live performance. I think it depends on what kind of live performance, but with recorded music that artifice is certainly is created when the record is produced, by the person running the soundboard, yes?

From AbSound review of Larsen 8:

<< The Sound In General
While the Model 8s have the consistency between room sound and direct sound of an omni, at the same time they are quite directional thanks to their wall placement—they are by nature half-space radiators. So the sound has a much greater directness than one gets from omnis. And this directness leads to extraordinary definition from the lower midrange on down. Trombones, for example, have the solidity and definition of attack that they have in reality. (Hearing a real trombone after listening to a trombone on a speaker tends to be a disconcerting experience. The speaker version lacks adequate definition of the complex initial structure all too often. But not here!)

This is not easy to quantify in measurement, but it is surely easy—and rewarding—to hear. The lower brass, the cello and basses, the bottom range of the piano, all such things acquire the kind of precision and sculptured sound that they really have. There is a good reason to have bass drive up against the boundaries. This is, of course, also the reason for the development of the corner woofer systems of TacT and Lyngdorf, and much earlier for the Allison speakers, which were placed either in corners or against the wall with woofer close to the floor.

This stuff works! One really hears the lower mids on down better. Not only is the presentation more even in frequency response but better in definition. (Because minimum phase matters, these two things are related, but in listening terms they are perceived as quite distinct.)

The stereo imaging of the Model 8s is again different from an ordinary speaker. The directness makes images seem very solid, but the focus of them is of a different character from free-space speakers. The images are either more “dimensional” or less focused, depending on one’s viewpoint. This is not an obvious matter in terms of realism, since the kind of focus of image that can arise in stereo is not really a feature of real sound. One can get to like it a lot, but in a real concert environment, the extreme image focus does not actually happen. The making of recordings has to some extent responded to this by using spaced microphone techniques that blur the stereo images in the recording no matter how one plays them back. Again, life is complicated. In any case, the Model 8s sound close to reality, but not exactly like other speakers as far as imaging is concerned. Imaging is convincing and hearing into the recording venue is excellent but the imaging is different in character. The wide pattern gives unusual stability, but focus is less precise. >>

AbSound / Larsen 8 review