Vandersteen's new affordable mono blocks at the CES 18

How wonderful 

@darthlaker system was i believe the inspiration for the paint color i picked for my 7’s ;-) ya man !!!!!

@veerapaneni  Randy has my old VXR-20 or did, which some say sounds better than the MXR-20 , and of course he has the REf250 as well. Randy is my dealer for RV’s amp, which i love.
best to you, hope you are enjoying the 7’s magical as they are.
jim

Well.... only a comparison between the Ayre VX-R Twenty and the Vandersteen M7-HPA possible in my system and that is somewhat problematic because of the external filter required for the Ayre and a cable change I made to AQ wild Blue Yonder ( necessitated by mono blocks )...

the other amps are single ended and in the case of the Bryston underpowered for the task and I am not going to buy a SE Model 7 high pass filter to do a test for them nor the 400a.  Any excellent Vandersteen amp dealer will have the needed gear and a wide variety of amplifiers to try :-)

i am not much of a review writer, but I will put some summary thoughts together...stay tuned...

@earthtones congrats, how wonderful!!!!! Enjoy the music !!!!!

@bdp24  Eric the DMM Buddy is sublime, I will post up complete thoughts later this weekend over in the Music section, you know where I hang out 99% of the time....

hi Pete, I might be the only guy on the planet with Vandersteen, Nelson Pass ( 400a ) and Bryston power amps, and I certainly get musical joy out of each...

in musing about this thread, i think scale is almost completely irrelevant when a designer seeks to push the state of the art. IF scale was such a big concern the high end as we know it would certainly not exist.  Its clear to me that RV can afford any amplifier and he has access to some if the best certainly he tends to show with Brinkmann, ARC, Aesthetix, DAG, Ayre and VTL, but certainly there are others. My understanding is he built the 7 because he wanted more. The 5 is an attempt to bring the price down and deliver most of the 7 capability. Is it a niche product ? with absolute certainty. Is it sweet sounding with Quattro, etc..sure. Ultimate value is in the eye of the beholder.

back to the music, I got an absolutely fantastic direct metal master Buddy Miller disc to spin....

but in my travels round the globe, the one thing that Crushes, absolutely crushes scale is innovation.....

small stuff like no emitter resistor, five parts in the signal path....
a radiator and liquid cooling for rock solid bias...built in HRS isolators 128 v DBS, etc..

@gdnrbob yes, he runs his own design at home, i have heard it  w Ayre MX-R so a bit dated but it is awesome and when I heard it was not the new circuit Dean and he came up with....

BTW did you see the pair of MXR-R twenty for $14 k ?

OK let’s cover liquid cooling in some detail.... and frankly the reviewers are iMO a bit remiss in missing MANY of the hyper unique innovations in the amps... but the performance of many circuits and devices is temperature dependent and in particular drives the amount of bias needed. IF you look at my virtual system page ( poverty bay sound ) you will see a rare under the hood photo of the M7 and the cooling collar - physical heat sinking is SLOW and results in the heat sink lagging or leading the device or sinking BACK to the device. Hence coolant/pump/radiator solution and bias is rock steady independent of load so the amp sounds the same at any volume or transient...... complex , ya, for a purpose, yes!!!! Now let’s talk attention to details that matter .. if you own an Aesthetix or ARC product you know you can defeat the display for better sound due to the digital chips causing hash.. the M7 and M5 have a complex analog regulator circuit to manage pump speed for coolant and bias. Would been easy to buy an off the shelf chip to do that and SQ would suffer...

enjoy the music and the journey 

jim

@stewart0722 why consider Vandersteen speakers using your logic ? Lots of db available for a whole lot less $$$ with a set of Peavy PA speakers. Bryston is high $ per watt vs Crown , etc.... 
quality per $ = value is the point.
bryston has economic scale for ampliers Vandersteen will never have. Also Vandersteen hand solder because they believe it sounds better than wave solder or SMD.... lots of subtle design and execution differences.
btw my mobile recording rack has a pair of Bryston monoblocks, fine amplifier for it’s intended purpose.

@blaven2 November 2019

I think JA addresses it nicely saying each amp has strengths, he prefers the Lamm at 2X the cost ( $31k )
I have heard Lamm products before in a variety of systems and they are quite good and hyper well engineered and robustly built. An amp that comes close at half the price ( think of it as getting the Quattro CT for free) is quite an achievement. Richard is hyper frugal and efficient, everything must earn its way into the product.
my buck fifty...

But I will comment a bit further, the M5 amp and Quattro CT are reviewed and measured in this month Stereophile.JA keeping amps to review as stand alone as the high pass is switchable.

RV calls his approach an “ unfair advantage “ in that he can optimize the amp to work with a known load ( his speaker) and avoid the issues with trying to build an amp flat to zero and also allow for some additional features unique to his shared DBS patent like 128 V
non technical ???? Just freakin listen :-)))

ah.....

Sorry I missed contributing to this thread since my post way back in January of 2018, when I first started running the M7-HPA amp. I have a thousand ish hours on them now and absolutely LOVE them. Zero issues, musical from day one, certainty no harsh midrange or treble and in fact I have been pushing speakers out into room and creeping a bit closer to side walls w no I’ll effect. In conversation w Richard he and Dean set some very ambitious goals for the smaller and much more affordable M5 amps. I believe they attained them. I can’t comment about 5a carbon driven by Pass other than to say I have deep respect for Nelson, his gear is always rugged and top notch. I still have a 400 A :-)
as to Quatros driven by a REF110, I have heard that and the M5 certainly should better it, a more direct comparison might be the REF150 se, Magic midrange like the 5
finally in filters, those of you using outboard high pass consider the model 7 high pass, better caps, more DBS juice and a non resonant case with WEL pigtails... I ran those w model 5a before getting the 7’s
have fun
enjoy the music

the new amps are factually $15 K the pair, the CES flyer will say preliminary pricing but if any of you have ever built anything of substance with hundreds of parts and a complicated supply chain that should be understandable. I have not heard them yet but I have spent the last three very enjoyable days and evenings ( very late sleep deprived listen all night kind of evenings) listening to his M7-HPA in my system. They replaced a no slouch Ayre VX-R Twenty.....

i will write a detailed review at some point but so far on no parameter would I go back to the Ayre.

on the point of amplifier chops. Dean is the man behind PSE which were giant killers, try to find one - people dont sell them for a reason. i think RV’s unique speaker and amp designer experience ( where do you think all the feed forward, power factor corrected sub amps came from ? ) drove some very unique engineering solutions into the M7: liquid cooling, no emiter R, cyclotronic SS topology, tube front end, built in power conditioning, DBS and HRS isolation....the list goes on

ya i am biased...

but wow am i happy listening...

now back to The Wayfaring Strangers - Shifting Sands of Time....sounds like microphone feeds off my high speed Revox