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January 12, 2009 9:05 AM PST

Vandersteen's $300,000 hi-fi wows audiophiles

by Steve Guttenberg
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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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About The Audiophiliac

Ex movie theater projectionist Steve Guttenberg has more or less successfully hitched his future to home theater, but he still pines for the clickity-clack of 35 MM projectors and all the stale popcorn he could eat. Between projectionist gigs he worked as a high-end audio salesman for sixteen years, and produced records for an audiophile label. Oh, and one more thing, nothing annoys Steve more than being confused with the other Steve Guttenberg, the washed-up Police Academy actor. The wordsmith Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to a number of magazines and websites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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