Sonus Faber Amati Homage versus Vandersteen 5A

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.

When venturing into the $$$ territory for speakers that you are Dbk, room optimization should and ultimately will become a significant investment in both time and money. My hunch is that as best we can evaluate speaker, amp, pre amd source combinations in store environments, we will always have the ability, given resources, to exceed the performance in-home, in terms of room treatment and component placement, simply because we have time. That simple facet of the listening experience, which helps average out our very plastic and flexible sensory/emotional/physical states can only occur over time and with repeated experiences. Trial end error in some cases, along with educated decisions about optmization of the listening environment, make for the best outcomes.

Note too that many B&M stores are now focusing on system installations and room treatments as the "added value" proposition for their own survival. I have almost no experience with room treament except for a bass buster in one corner. Did it help? I think so but there are some days and some recordings when I don't think it makes a difference.

I read the latest reviews in TAS about the B&O and Meridian speakers too. With Meridian my feeling is that the user is somewhat restricted to using their source components (not necessarily a bad thing, I enjoy my 508.24 and 504). The few times I have heard their systems it was with DVD-A sources and it was hard for a vinyl junkie like me to really get the whole sonic picture of what this system would sound like at home. I fear I would end up playing with menus more than I would just sit and enjoy music.

With the B&O, it's hard for me take them seriously suddenly because for so long they only made, IMO, systems that were primarily for the eye and not for the ear. So I'm sceptical about the TAS review.

You do have a point about how the "best" speakers may be influenced the least by room acoustics, but I hope we agree that in order to get the most from such designs requires dedication to optimizing that room acoustically. My cathedral ceilings don't help all aspects of my CS6s (snapping fingers reveals that horrid pinging noise bouncing off sprayed textured walls) and I look forward to being able to hear them when we downsize our living space this year.

I'll bet that in almost every case, given good choices between the rest of the components in a system, we all have the power and ability to make any system sound better than it ever did in the showroom.

the ones least influenced by the electronics and room acoustics. They are the ones that do the best job of reproducing the signal sent to it by the amplifiers. If your speakers are poorly designed, the best room acoustics (whatever this means) and equalization in the world are not going to help you.

DBK:
Ive heard the SF speakers in showrooms as well as in friends homes. They're good speakers, but would definitely not be my choice even now. I own Vandie 5s and will upgrade to 5As ASAP.

I suggest that you invest a small fraction of the cost of any of these speakers and travel to your local dealers or to ones who you want to work with. See what you like the most in demos and narrow it down from there. Also, consider who you're buying from. Make sure you're comfortable with their post purchase policies and setup of your purchase. In other words, know what to expect once you place your order.

The speakers you're considering are all VERY differnt from an engineering perspective. I suggest you take that into account because it will make a difference when you match them to your system and room.

Good Luck!

Boy, why do we get such dust-ups every time someone mentions "time aligned." As far as I am concerned, time aligned means the music sounds like early 19th century when playing Beethoven and the 1960's when doing Allman Bros.
What difference does the actual technical detail make?

A few years ago I heard a big Dunlavy speaker that, according to Stereophiles test, was easily the most technically perfect speaker ever tested -- flat on axis frequency response, no resonances in the waterfall time/frequency response test, and a virtually perfect right triange for the impulse response test (the essence of time alignment). You guessed it, the speaker sounded very disappointing.

"Time alignment," for dynamic speakers, like the Vandersteen, requires both the physical alignment of the drivers to be equidistant to the listener's ears at some point in space, and the use of 6db/octave crossover to preserve phase coherence. This means that each driver is covering a lot of the range that is being covered by another driver. This has its own set of problems--demands on driver operating out of its ideal range (cone breakup is bad for everything, including time alignment), comb filtering effects from the drivers having different acoustic centers and dispersion patterns, etc. For time aligned drivers to effectively integrate, one would have to be on axis and sitting relatively far back; if this means one is out of the nearfield, then reflects from the floor, ceiling, walls, etc., will pretty much destroy theoretical time alignment. In theory, I suppose the large crossover overlap could also damage "time alignment" by exacerbating doppler effects. If I were a theoretical purist, I would insist on my time aligned speakers being set up in a large anechoic chamber.

I have not really heard a correlation between "time alignment" and what I subjectively like, so I treat it as irrelevant. That said, I rather like the Vandersteen 5A, though I like my own non-time aligned speakers better. By the way, given the location and complex loading of the 5A's woofer, can anyone explain how it is really time aligned, anyway?