Vandersteen 5a Carbons

To those of you that said there is a lot of competition at that price point can you give some examples of speakers that compare?

For me, Vandersteen 5aCT's are the best I've heard at this price point. I've listened to most of the speakers mentioned in this thread along with nearly every other company out there from Legacy to Clearwave to Salk to Focal, Thiel, Eggleston, SF (new and older company), Proacs, B&W, Meridian, Linn, Aerial, NOLA, AN, Harbeth, Avalon, Rockport, Magico, Wilson, Dynaudio, many other smaller companies and nearly any mainline companies. I just like the coherency, clean open and musical song it makes. No smearing and it's fast, natural and most importantly to me it's flat without being boring. It gives you what the producer puts down.

Others have said they found some problems with them, but I honestly don't feel they have heard them in the proper setting (shows just don't count).
I spent the day yesterday with the Tidal dealer in the US. GREAT guy and what a nice system he had. We spoke and listened for hours. He works hard to get accolades at shows and he's earned many, but it still isn't what you hear in your home or even in a store. I give a ton of credit to the poster in this thread who said he didn't like part of what he heard, but it was a show and I bet he goes to a local show room to listen properly to give them a legit shot.
Obviously every speaker has fans or they would be sold.

I have owned Vandy 3's and 5's as well as their subs. I guess every speaker has its fan base. I talked to Richard several times and believe he is one of audio's all time greats. The speaker or the room it's housed in to me are the most important part of the audio chain, then everything must fall in behind it. So a speaker can only kill another one in the same room under the same conditions, each using the amp that it was voiced with in order for it to be a fair fight. The Vandy's are fantastic if your ears say they are the best then go for it, at that price I try to be damn sure I like it. i no longer own Vandy's, I still go to dealers to listen to them, to my ears the Rockports ( I heard them at Andy's home in Maine) set up properly are fantastic as well as some other brands, including king Sound, Merlin, Raidho, Vapor, etc. you can't go wrong with any of them, show conditions are not optimal I've hear the new Vandy's sound great then not so great. Once you have a great speaker design the hard work is building a system and a room that make it sound great!

Pal,
My thing is space-robbing panels (Sound Labs, Analysis Audio) have a lot strengths, a greatly reduced down side and come in to their own at that budget.

Guys, I just read the last few posts. Never owned Vandies, but a couple of years ago, I spent some time socializing with Treos at a dealer. The dealer had taken in trade an ARC VS-115 amp, which happened to have been the same model amp I was using at the time. I was underwhelmed.

Having said all that, I'm not so sure now that the fault was the Vandies, the amp, the cabling or any other system component. Instead, the problem may have been the room.

I'm not going to repeat the schpiel (sp??) I already posted in the DEQX thread that is still active. But suffice to say, I bought the DEQX PreMATE which corrected a goodly amount of my speakers' time alignment deficiencies. Even still, I can't say in good faith that my Paradigm Sig. 8s (v3) are as time coherent as the Vandies. But my speakers are more time coherent as corrected do sound better.

All that said perhaps the most important correction effected by the DEQX was room correction. If I didn't see the room effects with my own eyes via mic and computer display and hear the corrections with my own ears ... in my sound room, using my gear ... I wouldn't have believed such improvements were possible.

So ... back to the Vandy posts above. Even if I stipulate that Vandies are the most time coherent and best sounding speakers ever made and are driven by the best electronics, I submit that if the room sucks, the sound will suck.

Trust me on this. In fact, call Mr. Vandy himself, John Rutan of Audio Connection, and ask him what one could expect by way of performance if the room sucks. Johnny R is a pretty straight shooter. I surmise he would say get the room in order or be prepared to trash a lot of dough.

Btw, in my case, the room distortions were not limited to 500 Hz and below. Point being, I am dubious that the low end equalizer correction features in the better Vandies would be able to address all of my room issues.

Regards,

Bruce