How Much Power Do Vandersteen 5a's Really Need?

I owned the 5A’s for quite some time and drove them with Pass Labs Aleph 2’s 100w/ channel and found this was more than enough power to drive them. 

Given the low end is already powered, you would be driving the midrange and highs. They aren’t going to require much. What are they rated, and at what sensitivity? What kind of power are you looking at? Class A, A/B, D? SET, Tubes, SS... All factors in the discussion of a good match. I’m sure there are folks here with direct info for those speakers.

I've driven mine first with mono DR8s, then with a Luxman 110W integrated, and now with Music Reference RM9SE, 100 W/side.  All worked fine.  

I had the 5a for years before the 7’s. I used a variety of amplifier: Ayre , McIntosh, an ARC Ref 75 se was lovely....

how big is the room ? How loud do you listen ? Hint to set the EQ and set them up properly you need an analog SPL meter from RS.

congrats on what is still a world class speaker !!! Enjoy the music

yell if you need setup help

Thanks for all of the input. And thanks very much for the offer of help Tomic, I may reach out for setup assistance if needed. I do understand that the manual has a lot of setup information per a discussion I had with Richard Vandersteen, about these, yesterday. Hopefully that is of significant assistance. 

The room they will be in is very large, The listening area is about twenty feet wide by 15 deep. However, this is only 40% of the "great room" that the listening space is located in. Behind it, is the fireplace area, the dining room, and the kitchen. The ceiling are also vaulted.

I'm hoping to power these with my wonderful Conrad Johnson ARTse tube amp, with 140wpc per side, and a ton of gain. 

Listening volume will range from relatively quiet acoustic and singer songwriter selections, to now and then, loud, live rock concerts at something like at least semi-realistic volume. 

people generally seem to be throwing a LOT of power at them. Am I missing something? 

Yes: the logarithmic nature of power. 10 dB doesn't sound like much but its TEN TIMES the power. 

Look at the spec- they are 87dB. You can let these guys blow smoke up your a$$ or you can save a ton of time trouble and $$ and cross them off your list.

Never buy speakers under 92dB. Just don't.

Although I am firmly entrenched in the "more efficiency, the better" camp, 140 tube watts should be fine to drive these speakers.

Oz

I owned 5A’s for many years and drove them with both tubes and solid-state. 100 W should be fine for normal listening, but if you want to party they can really suck up the juice especially in your big room

With your new speakers and your existing amp you have a road racing Porsche. Hyper low distortion , in room real world bandwidth and superb stereo imaging. IF you want loud hyper efficient get a dump truck - it’s a different task at rock concert levels in a large space.

my offer of help stands, Richard invented your great speakers - no better source, glad you spoke with him. He answers the phone, since 1977

So you are saying all high efficiency speakers are "dump trucks"? Please tell me I misunderstood you.......

pick the right tool for the job.

yes, the more power the better they sound.....also (very important), you must have a high pass filter properly adjusted for your amplifier, or you can damage the speakers.   Don't just plug them in and play. 
Download the owners setup manual, and observe all they say.

pick the right tool for the job.

Broad sweeping statement, but I’ll bite.

Well designed horns with high quality supporting components can be every bit as articulate, detailed and refined as -insert your brand of low sensitivity loudspeaker here-. And where they shine over -again, your brand of loudspeaker- is in dynamics.

So two tools for the same job.

Oz

A mere 100 Watts on a 5A is a waste of a good speaker. 

Fair to say I'm a bit baffled by the widely divergent opinions on the amount of power necessary. 

I do have a question that has me completely confused, though. It was explained to me, by the current owner, that you connect your preamp via interconnect cable, directly to the external crossovers/high pass filters, which then connect directly to your amplifier.

While a very unusual connection scheme, I can understand how that works. What I cannot come up with any answer for, nor can any of the three audiophile friends I posed it to, is, how do the internal amplifiers that drive the low end get a signal if the entire signal from the preamp is going into the external crossovers/high pass filters? We're lost in that regard. 

From vandersteen:  "This top of the line High Pass Filter is specifically designed to be inline in front of your amp to roll of frequencies below 100 Hz. which are passed to the Model 7 series speakers and reconstructed in the amplifier powering the bass driver."

So the bass amplifier knows the filter steepness of the HP filter and corrects for it.  Because the filter is a gentle rolloff (I think they use a simple first order curve), you're still getting signal below 20hz and it's just amplified right back up by the bass section's amp.

mostly because the OP has really yet to define in db how loud ? 

and Oz “ my brand “ of speaker include horns, stats, planer, cones in boxes...and Vandersteens.... I think I am at 9 pair,  The horns are at my Flyrod builders workshop....

I think IF horns were the only answer, everyone would own them...

To the OP, 5a owners are giving you real world inputs that vary because they listen at different levels in different rooms. Hook yours up and form your won judgement, just don’t clip your amps. 

The Vandersteen powered bass is very unique. the first order hi-pass filter is inserted inline before your power amp. This does three important things: preserves phase, any other filter does not. It also GREATly reduces load on the amplifier as it does not need to reproduce full amplitude low bass....ever ! this load reduction sweetens the midrange and highs because the amp is not working as hard. The sub amp built into the 5a is optimized to drive just one speaker on the planet - the unique aluminum honeycomb push pull sub driver in the 5a and the 7. Power factor and feed forward corrected. and because you are using a high level speaker connection to both sub and speaker, the transfer funtion of your CJ amp imprints on both - seamless. yes the sub amp restores the bass signal to flat. ......

Jim

To set the inline filter correctly need to know the CJ input impedence. Most likely in your CJ manual and specifications. IF not you can use Vandertones and a Voltmeter.

After that, you are on to setting the 11 bands of EQ for each channel below 120 HZ.....

I have set 5a up in a 45’ x 20’ x 10’ great room in Charleston, SC....they were flat to twenty in that room.200,wpc Mac amp w ARC pre....Lovely

Credit due Robert Taylor of Taylor house audio for the assist, many on the board will remember him.

Beautifully explained Tomic601

Tomic, thanks very much for taking the time to explain things. It's greatly appreciated. I already have the impedance of my CJ in hand ( Input Impedance 100 kOhms).And I can understand the benefits of the external hi pass filters being employed.

However, I still cannot understand how the internal 5a bass amplifiers get a signal so that they are aware of what to reproduce. The information associated with the music being played is sent from the preamp to the M5HP's, and those then connect directly to the amplifier sending the music signal information to the amplifier, which then provides it to the speakers. Do the speaker connections on the 5a's internally distribute the amplified signal to both the bass amplifiers (for the bass signals), and separately to the midrange and tweeters?  

yes ! The internal amp in the 5a accepts a filtered speaker level input

right from your power amp. Now that you know amp input impedence, remove covers and set DIP switches to match settings called out in manual or on stickers affixed to each filter.

The high pass filter reduces the lows at a specific rate, but the lows are increased at the same rate which gives a flat frequency response.

I made the 5 hour drive (each way, not counting gas and food) to pick up the speakers today and all went well. VERY excited to have them home tonight with me. Beautiful Bubinga wood on these. And the surface is textured, a sort of crinkling that even adds to the look. 

Granted, after a brief glance at the manual (it has been a very long day) and all the previous comments, the setup on these seems pretty daunting. And I say that a someone who has successfully assisted and or set up at least a dozen speakers, of numerous brands, in the past. 

Getting everything locked down and optimized looks like  serious challenge, but, also clearly worth it in the end. 

Thanks to everyone for the explanations and assistance thus far in the process. Now I just have to wait for the single ended M5HP external high pass filters to arrive from Switzerland. I had to order them, as my equipment is single ended, and the speakers I purchased came with the XLR versions of the M5HP. Hopefully I can sell that and recoup that additional expense. I also need to quickly get in an order for the appropriate length of bi-wired cables, as I have nothing the right length, and every speaker I have is either terminated in bananas or spades too large to fit the terminal connections on the back of the 6a's. So, much as it will be painful, there will be a substantial delay before I can even start on this. :(

It appears that the standard spade connectors on speaker cables are, in general, too large for use with the 5a's. We checked two pairs of my existing cables, and two pairs of my friends (which he brought over earlier). All of the spade connectors were too large to fit the available space at the back of the speakers.

Which raises a serious question, which good quality (affordable) brands of speaker cables use spades that will fit?

Audioquest is a great choice for Vandersteen speakers. They will  make cables with the right size spades for them. Enjoy! They are amazing speakers.

I have Quatros and 3 foot audioquest biwire cables that fit perfectly.

Does anyone know where the Vandersteen CD used for setting up speakers can be gotten? Their site has a download, but I have no means of getting that download to my system. 

Nightfall - Where are you located ? I have a pair of 8’ Audioquest loaner cables you may borrow. @bigkidz has them....
Dealers will have the CD, or contact factory. You must use The RS analog SPL meter, the Cd is compensated for it.

YES ! your xlr filters are easy to sell here on audiogon...in demand

finally congrats on scoring a lovely veneer....

tomic, thanks again, VERY much. I'm in Michigan, central part of the state and the loan of cables, especially right now, would be  a huge help. Thanks so much.

I'll look into the CD via the sources you suggested. And get the XLR filters listed to help to eventually fund cables. 

Thanks also, the veneer is really stunning. 

Vandersteen will send the CD to you for $10.

Thanks. Ordering the cd from Vandersteen as we speak. 

Hi Nightfall, (apologies for the length of this post) I too just bought a pair of 5As in early January; a 10 year old pair from their original owner. I’ve been engaged in a slow motion upgrade of my system over the past three years, and I wasn’t yet in the market for speakers to replace my 15 year old 2ce Sigs, BUT, the 5A’s owner lives just a few blocks from me in Altadena, CA and the price ended up being very attractive, so, they are now in my system.
I just wanted to offer my experience from the past couple of weeks as a new 5A owner in case any of it might be of use to you. As you are aware, the 5As, particularly if buying used, are not a plug and play proposition.

1 -  The 9v batteries in my high pass filters and crossovers had not been changed since the speakers were purchased, but before I had them replaced, I just had to get the speakers up and running in my room to get an idea of what they sounded like. I was rather uneasy to discover that they didn’t sound great . . . dark, and . . . not great. (Uh oh, have I made a big mistake?) But, as I did more reading - I’ve been reading everything I can on every forum about the 5As for the past month and reading the manual over and over - I found an exchange in the Ask Richard forum on the Vandersteen site where he said, yes, you can run the speakers with dead 9v batteries, but they will sound DARK and LIFELESS. Yes! Exactly! After having had the 9v batts replaced last week the speakers now sound VIBRANT and ALIVE. It also seemed to me that it took a day or two for the 9v batts to take full effect. Again, somewhere on the Ask Richard board he mentions that it takes a little time for the 9v batts to reform the caps in the crossovers.
2 - My soldering skills are virtually non existent. I built a Bottlehead phono stage from a kit ten or so years ago. That’s my only soldering experience. So I was very happy when the dealer I work with, Brian Berdan of Audio Element in Pasadena, told me he’d be happy to deal with the batteries. Otherwise I would have sent the gear back to Vandersteen and had them handle it. Even for Brian, it was a fiddly and tedious project. It probably took him about four hours, end to end, to do it. And, along the way three of the lithium batteries I had supplied ended up getting fried. (Apparently the lithium batts are more sensitive than alkalines to being nuzzled by a soldering iron.)
3 - I was happy to have a Fluke multimeter on hand from my Bottlehead building days, to do the high pass filter double check for impedance values. My amp, a VTL S-200, has a 45k input impedance according to its manual. Setting the 5As high pass filters at 50k confirmed this as the correct setting to set the dip switches for. (Along the way I also set the HPFs for 33k, 75k and 100k, just to see. But it was the 50k that sounded best.)
4 - I followed Richard Vandersteen’s low frequency calibration procedure, which you can find on the Vandersteen site under Resources / Videos / How to set up Vandersteen Adjustable Bass EQ, using the SPL Meter app, by Studio Six Digital, on my iPhone 11 pro. Vandersteen uses a specific Radio Shack spl meter that he says the Vandertones are calibrated to. I saw that the Radio Shack meter can be found on eBay for about 50 bucks, and I may buy one yet, or borrow one from Audio Element, but again, being a little impatient I thought I’d roll the dice and see if I could get close with the app. So far it seems like I’m in a pretty good ball park. Others here with more experience than I may chime in with information regarding the adequacy or short comings of the iPhone app.
Vandersteen’s video is very detailed and very helpful. The entire process, which I’ve done three times now, takes a couple of hours.
5 - I’ve placed my speakers in about the same spot that I had my 2ce Sigs, which were placed according to the room division chart in the Vandersteen manual. (I’d listened to the 2ce Sigs in a lot of positions over the years, using various methods, but at the end of the day it was the setup procedure in the Vandersteen manual that sounded best.) I’m going to play around with the 5A’s positioning over the next few days to dial them in as best I can, but I feel like it will be a few inches here, an inch or two there sort of proposition rather than major changes. I’ve also set up the tilt with the washers, using the formula in the 5A manual.

(BTW, my room dimensions are about 25 x 13.5 x 8. I have the system on a short wall firing the length of the room. Speakers are about 60 inches from the back wall, about 3 feet from the side wall on the left side and about 4.5 feet from the side wall, which actually opens into a foyer, on the right side. My seating position ends up about 11 to 15 feet from the speakers, depending on which chair I’m in, with the rear wall 5 to 10 feet behind me, again, depending on the chair I’m in.)

I know that lots of people here have a LOT more experience with these speakers, and a lot of other speakers, amps, sources, etc., than I. (I have found Johnny R’s posts indispensable!) But I just wanted to give you my newcomer experience with them. The main thrust of which is, change the 9v batteries now if they haven’t been recently replaced!

I’m really jazzed to have the opportunity to live with these speakers, I’m discovering song by song, LP by LP, how good they are.

Rock on, John
My system - VPI Scout & Hana HL, VTL 6.5 phono stage, Bluesound Vault, Chord Qutest Dac, BAT VK 30 pre, VTL S-200 amp, Vandersteen 5A speakers, mainly Cardas cable throughout,  Quadraspire SVT rack.

Edit - my cart should read Hana SH

jlmcc lovely system, spend the $ for the analog RS meter, i have the studio 6 on an ipad, it yields somewhat different results. BUT !!!!! awesome job getting them setup.The factory charge to replace batteries is quite reasonable and remember both the internal filters AND the high pass have batteries. congrats on awesome speakers and Brian Berdan is a great guy !!!!

to the OP, Peter should be shipping the loaner cables to you. 

Thanks for the heads up tomic, I’ll track down an RS meter. And yes, Brian replaced all eight batteries between the crossovers and the high pass. 

I was just informed by Vandersteen that due to copyright issues, they can no longer sell, or distribute the Vandertones CD. No idea where to turn now. 

A kind Auiogoner is going to let me borrow his cd. :)

@jkmcc.Nice Post and Welcome to Audiogon.
BTW- There is a forum on Vandersteen's website. 
It would be nice to see you there.

Bob

Thanks Bob, I’ll head over there at some point and introduce myself.

I spent a productive and enjoyable few hours today making adjustments to the speaker placement - a few inches further apart, toe in - very slight, and the low frequency and bass contour levels. I think I’m getting somewhere! All very exciting.

@OP, 
And, don't forget to pick @tomic601 's brain. 
He is very knowledgeable with Vandy placement. Also, PM John Rutan (audioconnection). He set up my Treo's with his assistant Samir. Considering that my speakers had to stay in literally one spot, he got them to really disappear. 
Bob

Vandertones still available to download on the website, if needed.  

Yes, it is still available on the website, but only as an MP3. I haver no means of playing an MP3 on my system, unfortunately. I do have a streamer, and a NAS, but they only handle FLAC, WAV or DSD files. 

you can use several programs to convert mp3 to .wav then play via NAS do a google search on converting...
i am working your CD but had a setback in getting access to it.
jim

try Convertio 

so, several problems solved...

Dbpoweramp ( the software program ) includes a batch file conversion engine, MP3 to flac for all the Vandertones tracks took less than 3 minutes. The OP now has flac files via email which he can play on his NAS. BTW Vandertones are a free download and should be used by interested in what is going on below 120 HZ in your room....
OP also now has a set of high milage Audioquest shotgun biwire cables w Vandy size spade on speaker ends.
:-)
on to music !!!!!!!

Great job Jim +1 😉