For Vandersteen owners & lovers: Which other brands do you like?

Cabinet in a cabinet starts w Treo. It’s expensive… The 7 is cabinet in cabinet and a carbon fiber layer. The 1-2-3 aka sock series are too budget constrained to get the lower distortion cabinets, ditto the original sock Quattro. I will mention, ALL the Vandy cabinets are built in house in California…..

The 5 series are massively braced and use a very dense stack w milled cavity for the head assembly. The 5A is as mentioned a fantastic speaker….still today…. probably a bit much in your room… just my $.02.

tomic601 / JIM,

what a lovely civil and helping thread…warms my heart….maybe just maybe there are great caring humans here after all….

I had the EXACT same thought as I re-read the replies.

I do hope to see you in CA, and hope you get together with my pal John. Thanks for all of your advice and input so far.

Best,

PD

i’ve listened to the 2CE model on NAD electronics [the combo was on the darker side] and i’ve listened to my 1CI on a rega brio R [brighter balance but utterly non-harsh]. both DEMAND a larger than average listening room with plenty of breathing space around the speakers to where they are no closer than 3 feet from the rear wall and at least twice that from side walls. put them in any room smaller than that and those speakers tend to sound shouty. if i had at least a 20’ wide and 20’ deep [8’+ ceilings a must] listening room, i’d take my vandies out from storage and give them another listen. they made everything, even sub-par recordings, sound decent enough at least for casual listening in the aforementioned giant room. they had 3D imaging [ultra-narrow sweet spot] in an entry-level price point. then again, my thiel cs.5 speakers will do that in a tiny [14’ wide and deep] room, which is why i listen to the thiel speakers rather than the vandies. plus the thiels throw a much wider image beyond the outside edges of l/r speaker, with more depth.

In my younger years i spent a bit of time surf fishing Steelhead on the wild sides of your Island… Paradise….

@tomic601 have you tried NZ?
A coworker (Brown) went there and did a bunch of stream work.

His guide told him to bait the hook behind a tree. When he asked why, the guide told him that the fish will jump out of the stream to take the bait right out of your hand.

I was not quite as hooked when I went shopping back in the day, and they were only up to the model 2 then. But eventually I was hooked, and not a lot lured me in.

But that was ages ago… it is easier to stumble upon good speakers these days.

I’d try DeVore Fidelity - a little more open than Vandys and with low order crossovers.

@keithr funny you should mention them. I only heard them at the beginning of this year, but I was pretty impressed at the soundstage width.
(Some place in downtown Los Angeles)

They seems like they had a lot of distortion, but in a pleasing way, and it might have been the Jadis stuff that powered them causing that “fullness”.

They were impressive.

I’ve owned the Vandersteen 2c and 3a. Placement was always a PITA. If you have a Spendor dealer in your neck of the woods you should give them a listen. If you like the sound of Vandersteens I think you will like Spendors!

https://spendoraudio.com/