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

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..

Dcbingaman
If You could point to the sub woofers in your Quatro Fabric speakers You do not have them dialed correctly. Having the bass corrected for the listening position is the only position that matters. It is a fact that having multiple woofers in a room will automatically measure flatter than one. This is mostly why stereo woofers in a room always sound better than mono. DSP correction with multiple woofers would sound great in the bass except as everybody knows the best systems sound superior with analog sources (records or tape) and people that own them don’t want digital (including class “D” amplifiers) anywhere near their system. Having Vandersteen speakers with the bass tuning supplied is State Of The Art in an all analog system for many a seasoned audiophile.
Best JohnnyR

Thanks, Johnny. Richard says the same thing. The digital reconstruction filter is the key ingredient. I use a Meridian G68XXD which uses their patented apodizing filter and 24 bit / 96 kHz digital processing of all inputs. I honestly can't hear a difference between an analog signal from my Pass XP-15 phono stage going direct to my amps (through an ALPS Black Beauty pot), vs. through the Meridian, except that the Meridian has much more coherent bass due to the Meridian Room Correction (MRC). I have also fooled all the golden ears in the St. Louis Gateway Audio Society, who simply don't believe they are listening to digital when I play vinyl.

This may be unique to Meridian's latest software however, because I couldn't stand digital before I got this setup. The only other system that I am aware of that sounds this good is the dcs stuff the pros use. I got to spend a half day in the DTS mastering center in Calabasas, CA listening to their DTS Neo X software playing digital tracks through an 11.2 speaker setup. Most incredible sound I've ever heard. It was all based on proprietary DTS software and custom dcs digital DSP's and ADC/DAC's. I asked how they did it and they just smiled, but commented that the computing throughput and the reconstruction filters were critical.

The point is, you have to go digital for the best room correction, for multi-channel and for any recording that's not vinyl. (Even for most remastered vinyl, the signal has been digitized in the recording process.). For me that means using Meridian processing - nothing else a consumer can buy compares.