Vandersteen 5Aa Carbon--any 5a owner's opinions?

Well, I do know now that John has a pair of 7s in New Jersey. I'm going to try to set up an audition there this spring when I'm out that way anyway. I think it's the best place to hear them anyway. Many speak of John almost as highly as they do of Vandersteen himself. Probably one of the top Vandersteen dealers in the country.

My fear is I will be smitten with the 7s. Two speaker designers in history have really captured my allegiance, John Dunlavy and Richard Vandersteen. Sadly, we'll never know what else Dunlavy may have come up with. The 7s though embody all of Vandersteens innovations, fusion subwoofer, minimum baffle enclosures, 1st order crossovers, transmission lines, perfect piston drivers and carbon fiber layered enclosures. So much for early retirement. Work keeps us young (and out of trouble).

Bass - Richard's system is really good - maybe the best. However, technology moves on and no stereo pair of subwoofers can flatten out all the room modes encountered in a real world room. An eleven-band analog equalizer can't match the 100's of poles a DSP-based digital filter can provide, and can't alter the subwoofer phase across the passband.

The answer is a distributed subwoofer system like the 4-woofer Audiokinesis Swarm and digital room correction (250 hz down). Through proper (asymmetric) placement it can completely flatten the room response in combination with digital room correction like Meridian's MRC system. With this type of system, the Seven is overkill.

It would be nice if Richard put both the 5a tweeter AND the Carbon / Balsa 4.5" driver in the Quatro Wood CT, because with the Swarm you don't need anything bigger. Also the 7 tweeter is unique - no phase plug. The 5a and Quatro tweeters are carbon monolithic domes without the "C sandwich" construction of the 7's dome. Not sure if this makes a difference, but the 7 is unique in more ways than one.

overly flat at least w just eleven bands of EQ under 120 HZ sounds dull and lifeless....
so says the manual, Richard and for grins I tried it w 5 a..true enuf dialing it in the last .5 DB was lackluster....
no real urge to mess w 7. ' s yet..enjoying staying up most of the nite listening....

When I say flat, I mean with a smooth response over most of the room, such that the room's dominant nodes and anti- nodes ( i.e. suck out) do not dominate the "Rayleigh Region" where the wavelength of the sound and the room dimensions are of the same order. The problem with Richard's approach is that stereo speakers usually end up in symmetrical positions in the room, so the best you can do with the equalizers is to reduce the magnitude of the peaks at the principal listening position. Look at the settings of your left and right equalizers - unless you have a highly asymmetric room, they are probably set the same. This means that the sound may be pretty good in your favorite chair but it is very uneven everywhere else in the room. This causes another form of coloration, reverb, that tells your brain you are in your 16 ' x 22' x 8' sound room, and NOT really at the recording venue.

In addition you can't do much about suck-out, since Richard only puts a 400 watt amp in the 7's and a 250 watt amp in the Quatro's. You would need much more power than this to fill in the suck-out that plagues every normal size listening room I've ever been in, but is notably absent in a concert hall, because of its size.

The only answer is to spread the bass transducers around the room so that you normalize out the dominant room nodes, and then trim it with a really good DSP room correction software calibration with (ideally) individual settings for each woofer, and at the very least for the left, right and .1 channels, like Meridian's MRC. If you do this, (and I have with two Quatros and five distributed subwoofers), the room literally disappears, and you will swear you are at the recording venue.

This is fairly new technology, but the concept has been analyzed by Earl Geddes, Fred Toole, Bob Stuart of Meridian, and Duane LeJeune of Audiokinesis. REG reported on the Audiokinesis Swarm system in The Absolute Sound earlier this year, and stated that the Swarm produced the best, most accurate bass he had ever heard - and he did his audition without any equalization. With digital room correction, it gets even better, but the corrections are much smaller than they would be for 1, 2 or 3 woofers. (With my set-up I have seven woofers which all end up about seven feet apart and all around the room.)

I was so bowled over by this, I decided to upgrade my fabric Quatros to the carbon versions, but I am thinking that the Swarm may make the Treo's sound just as good, since they dominate below 80 hz.

BTW, if I blindfolded you and asked you to point to the subwoofers, you couldn't do it - the bass ambient sound is completely non-directional....as it should be. There is no suck-out and the only nodes appear right in the room corners, but at greatly reduced magnitude. The impression this gives is a much more natural acoustic environment and, with classical music, much like a good concert hall. It is spooky good.

good points..sounds like YOU are getting incredible performance out of your system..which is WHY we do this.

my room is HIGHLY irregular with 3 large and unequal openings, sloped ceiling in two directions peak 20' with a lot of natural diffusion. the two channels of EQ differ somewhat but largest imbalance unequalized is 3 db at 50 , 60, 84 and 100 HZ. Richard has heard the 5 a in my room and he had interesting things to say about dedicated sound rooms...it passed his ear.
its a one chair gig for me but I can imagine how swarm works and works well. for grins I will rerun Vandertones at the two other seat positions in the room, even tho one is off axis a fair bit and nearfield..