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.
