Pic of 100,000 dollar Von Schweikert speakers. CES

I listened to them for a while. At first I was unimpressed by the set up; imaging was average at best, and there was no real depth or emotion to the music. The CD did not sound good at all, surprising since Oracle was supplying the CDP/DAC. Once the turntable was fired up things improved considerably: warmth, center-fill, depth, it all seemed to come into it's own. An improvement, but the toes never got tapping though...I went away thinking it was an interesting experience but quite honestly there were better sounding rooms at the show for 1/20th of the cost of the VS rig. I'd take the simple set-up in Gallo's two channel room ($2600 speakers), the Vandy Quattro's ($6500) or the Fostex speakers ($3000) over the VS extravaganza.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I thought they sounded phenomenal. I sat in the sweet spot and played my own material (Black Light Syndrome, track 3). They did everythign an enormous system should do in my opinion. I heard that track 30 times over the week, and nothing came close. Instrument separation was awesome, and i found trementdous depth of sounstage, as well as width.

A friend who has X-1s in an extremely well setup room commented they were the only thing that could compete with the X-2s he has on order.

I thought the Quattros sounded fairly average. The 5As next door were much more to my liking.

Oh well, show conditions make all this very tough.

There were multiple rows of chairs set up and admittedly I wasn't front & center. I'm not sure there ought to be a real "sweet spot" with a cavernous room and gear of that size/expense though... I suppose it all scales. I'm glad to hear you were able to listen to your own disc and use it as a benchmark, that does make a big difference. If you heard Dire Straits "Brother in Arms" blaring in a room last week (or saw a guy wandering around in shorts during CES), that was me.

I agree the 5A's sounded better than the Quattros; the question du jour is... do the 5A's sound 2x better than the Quattros? Nope, the infamous slippery slope. Do the Quattros squash anything in their price range? Um... that's hard to say because there's a lot of great speakers in the $5k to $6k range. They certainly are contenders.

What's the best "value" speaker today? Eminent Technology LFT VIII's followed very closely by the new Gallo speaker. If money was no object I'd flip a coin and either buy the Vandy 5A's, or cheat and buy a pair of SoundLabs.

How much are the shipping crates? $5K? :-)