Vandersteen Speakers.. Are All Other Speaker Makers Doing It Wrong ?

I time align my speakers manually every day about beir time. I put down a cold one and if something is off, I drink another.

+1 for Wilson Benesch & "tcutter" summed it up perfectly.  W-B is not the only awesome speaker line on the planet but worth exploring.

So, no Vandersteen is not the only speaker company to do it right.

Cheers

listening to Vandersteen speakers it is evident Richard Vandersteen just doesn't get PRAT. Temporally challenged to a tee..

Look, I am not up to speed on Vandersteen speakers, but I owned them. Generally speaking there are 2 primary camps which further divide from their primary camps into vast nbers of camps. You have I want pleasing types, who no matter how poorly something was mastered, they want to be able to enjoy it. Then there is the I want what it sounds like camp. Neither is wrong, music is subjective!

Generally speaking, and historically speaking Vandersteen has been at the pinnacle of the it should all sound pleasent camp, IMO. They have always made fine speakers. They sound much like my speakers were I to toss a quilt over the tweeters and midrange drivers, I don’t know if this is still the case.. I have done modifications to their speakers, but it took driver substitution to make impressive differences, IME, of reportedly defunct speakers. I am told that they have radically changed, and now no longer Barry the details. That would require a paradigm shift, and on the face of it seems unlikely.

KEF was the first company that I am aware of to design phase and time aligned speakers. B&W, Thiel, and Vandersteen followed suit. Of course there are others too, but these were the big players a few years ago

Of these, Vandersteen alone dampened the sound. B&W 801Ms with the redesigned crossover and critical capacitors bypassed is an awesome speaker. Thiels were pretty well respected, but with bright gear can be ear bleaders, the downside of accuracy is that all your gear must be neutral or you’re going to have issues, which wasn’t an issue with Vandersteens, hence many loved the no muss no fuss that was Vandersteens. I don’t know what it the case today, though I suspect it is more of the same.

Best bet, listen for yourself! If you like it, enjoy it, listening is a personal experience.

One more thing, they are only perfectly time aligned at a particular distance. Greater or lesser distances distort that, and they should be such at a frequency in the midrange of each driver. IOW, the highest and lowest frequencies of a particular driver will not be perfectly aligned as different frequencies travel at different speeds, and so it goes. This is less critical than it sounds because of this issue.