The 1C, not just another box speaker.
(Credit: Vandersteen)Last year's HDTVs are yesterday's news, but great audio designs, like Vandersteen's Model 1C floor-standing speaker ($995/pair) stick around for decades.
Richard Vandersteen designs speakers for buyers who care more about sound than fashion. His stuck-in-the-1980s styling isn't a calculated stab at retro. The handsome 1C tower speaker was originally introduced in 1981 as the Model 1, and the "C" iteration debuted in 1996. No matter, it still sounds better than any speaker I've heard near the 1C's price. It's as good as it gets for under a grand.
Change for the sake of change isn't an option at Vandersteen, and that extends to bucking the industry stampede to move production offshore. Vandersteen still builds all of his speakers in Hanford, California, and every speaker is tested and measured in the factory's anechoic chamber. That's commitment.
It's a two-way design featuring a 1-inch alloy dome tweeter mounted just above an 8-inch woofer. The speaker is 36 inches high and weighs 44 pounds. Build quality is absolutely superb.
As you can see from the picture, the 1C isn't a conventional "box" speaker; the baffles supporting the drivers were designed to be as small as possible to reduce the reflections that are (unfortunately) part of the sound of conventional speakers.
The audible differences between box speakers and the 1C aren't subtle, so the very first thing you'll notice about the Vandersteen sound is that it's remarkably "open" and dare I say it, it approaches the purity of some high-end panel speakers. It's simply more natural sounding than any box speaker near the 1C's price.
The Vandersteens' soundstage depth is positively addicting; the spacious image isn't just wide and deep, it's also taller than average, which adds to the believability of the sound.
... Read moreAudiophiles are on a quest; we're always lusting after the perfect fill-in-the-blank (speaker, amplifier, turntable, CD player, etc).
Catch is, perfect gear wouldn't automatically make every recording sound life-like. At that point the gear wouldn't have a sound per-se; the recordings' sound would be laid bare.
The MBL 101X-Treme Reference System, $250,000, approaches perfection.
(Credit: MBL America)I wrote "How high do you want your fi?" for the April 2009 issue of Stereophile magazine, and I'm still getting a wide range of feedback about that piece from readers and friends.
I'm defining a "perfect" hi-fi as one that's indistinguishable from the sound of live instruments. No hi-fi has ever fully recreated the sound of a symphony orchestra, jazz group, or rock 'n' roll band. Solo instruments fare better, i.e. guitars, flutes, and vocals; you can almost get a glimpse of their sounds over the best high-end systems. But a drum kit? Piano? No way!
Audio components are far from perfect, so it's no surprise their sounds aren't 100 percent convincing. As imperfect as the gear is, the recordings themselves are even further away from documenting the sound of vocals and instruments.
The age-old analog/digital divide is the least of it. The musicians do their thing, and then the microphones, their positions relative to the instruments, the skill and imagination of the engineer/producer/mastering team's use of equalization, compression, processing, etc., create the sound we hear.
Pop or rock music is rarely played by the complete band, with vocals, live in the studio. Out-of-tune singers and players are pitch-corrected, drummers' off-kilter rhythms are tweaked, there's not a lot of there there to reproduce. Most recordings are so heavily processed they could never sound real.
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The Model Seven
(Credit: Michael Trei/DVICE)Over at Dvice, my buddy Michael Trei was floored by the sounds at the Vandersteen room at the Consumer Electronics show last week in Las Vegas. The company debuted its new Model Seven speakers in a $300,000 system while spinning LPs.
Richard Vandersteen told me about these new speakers last year, when he was still perfecting his balsa wood/carbon fiber "sandwich" material for tweeters and woofer drivers. It's super lightweight, which enables the driver to keep up with the music's ever changing signals better than more conventional materials, yet it's so strong, you can actually stand on a balsa/carbon cone without damaging it.
Building each driver is, at least for now, a labor-intensive process, so the Model Seven is considerably more expensive than Vandersteen's bread-and-butter models (prices start around $785 a pair. The Model Seven will sell for $45,000 a pair. Vandersteen speakers are manufactured in Hanford, Calif.
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