Sonus Faber Amati Homage versus Vandersteen 5A

They are all nominal 4ohm designs, and real world impedance curves throughout the bandwidth will confim that any competent amplifer can drive em all with relative ease.

Specs may give you a hint, but will never fully tell you what a speaker will sound like. Those who simply want to reject all speakers which are not phase coherent or which have certain shaped impedance curves or which are this much efficient or inefficient all miss the point. You can't take a single piece of data out of the context of the product as a whole. These are speaker SYSTEMS, which mean that they rely on many factors to reproduce sound. Some of these factors are known and can be measured. Others are most certainly unknown as to why one speaker will sound better than another. Moreover, the conventional wisdom as to what factors are important in designing a high-quality speaker system are certainly only half-true or perhaps will be proven not true at all in the future. Indeed, using our ears alone, we cannot even agree on what is an excellent high-quality speaker for the large part. So how can we agree on what are the essential must-have ingredients and designs for an excellent speaker? My feeling is, unless we design speakers for a living, the less said about the "how" as justification for great sound, the better. We don't really know if the "how" is the "why" for the great sound we think we are hearing. We are typically only relying on what the manufacturers are telling us. Can't we just relax and enjoy the music without fighting about the engineering and can't we all just get along?

1) We can all get along; no more "fighting" about engineering from my end...
2) Actual listening to systems is the best way to evaluate ultimate inter-component compatibility...but
3) One CAN make sensible choices BEFORE listening to particular component combinations, e.g., whether a particular amplifier would be well suited for driving a speaker based on a couple of specs, or whether the output impedance of a particular preamp would be suited to the input impedance of an amp. My point being that, at the very least, some incompatibilities, based on electrical parameters, can be screened out ahead of time by such methods.

Confessions:

1. I haven't heard the Vandersteen 5A, just the 5.
2. I am a Vandersteen 3A Signature owner.
3, Although generally a fan of Vandersteen, I feel myself to have enough objectivity to let my ears make the decision, not my prejudices.

I heard both the 5 and the Sonus Faber Amati Homage years
ago. It wasn't at the same time or at the same dealer.
First off, if these two speakers were pitted in a beauty contest, the Amati would win hands down. They are flat-out gorgeous. The Vandersteen 5 is large, squat, clunky-looking and, in my opinion, cannot be considered, in any sense, a decorative enhancement to a living room. The Amati looks like a piece of furniture or a musical instrument such as a harp, doubling as a speaker. It is a visual enhancement to almost any room in your home.

Sound-wise, I would give the contest to Vandersteen by a wide margin. Remember that the listening sessions were at different dealers, using different electronics, in different rooms. The Vandersteen dealer takes particular care about setups, equipment matching etc. and room placement, while I would say that the other dealer seems to have difficulty showing equipment off to its best advantage. Sonus Faber Amati is certainly not a bad speaker. I found it just slightly on the warm side and I really have nothing bad to say about it. Although I don't remember any obvious flaws, it just didn't make me sit up and take notice of anything which it did exceptionally well. I thought that $20,000.00 was a lot to pay for what I was hearing. They are deep-bass shy, which I won't call a flaw, because for many, it is not a strong need to have. It is still worth noting and although the Vandersteen 5 did not excel in my deep bass tests, it had a far more substantial low end than the Amati's. Sorry for not saying more about the Amati's, I would say more about them if I remembered more.

The Vandersteen 5 was exceptional in 2 out of the 3 auditions in which I heard them. They are neutral, open, airy and throw off a wide soundstage in which individual instruments can be precisely located. It is an extremely smooth-sounding system, but instruments operating within the midrange and treble had just enough "bite" to sound real. Many of the complaints that people have about Vandersteen systems are just unequivocally absent on the 5's. Faults of the Vandersteen: I thought that all 3 times that I heard them, the bass was less than exceptional, a surprise for a Vandersteen speaker. Dynamics were also OK, but not standout, also a surprise. I heard them with Ayre K1 preamp, and V1 amp, again with K1 preamp and Bel Canto EVo amplifier. The third time which was at the N.Y. High Fi Show, used an Aesthetix Callisto preamp and Cary V-12 tube amp. I liked that demo the least. I don't remember the electronics used with the Amati's. It could have been BAT electronics, which I have never favored.

I am not sure where this thread is going but I have learned about three more speakers now in the running at this price point in addition to the Wilson WP7, Vandersteen 5A, SF Amati Homage, and Ariel 20T now including Dali Euphonia MS5/4, The Bang & Olufson Beolab 5 and the Meridian DSP 7000. These are radically different design approaches. I believe the future of hi end audio might be speakers that can be tuned to the in-room acoustics by electronically tailoring their output through feed back. The truth is that no speaker will sound the same in our own respective home environments when compared to the showroom. Ideally we would want a speaker that would sound better that what we had heard. I have decided to make my own listening room with acoustic treatment in an attic space that is now unfinished. I plan to do this while auditioning the various speakers mentioned (a time consuming process but worth the efffort). We do need to believe our ears when the investment is substantial (40K) or more. In the end everything needs to be synergistic but the best speakers are the least influenced by electronics and room acoustics IMO.