Vandersteen Seminar at Audio Connection (NJ)

Audio Connection hosted a fantastic seminar this past Saturday with Richard Vandersteen.  Richard spent a few hours answering questions and telling us about what's going on at Vandersteen.  One of the more interesting tidbits (IMHO) was Richard's focus (obsession?) on the non-pistonic behavior of cones, found in even in "hi end" drivers (but not his carbon/balsa ones).  Richard seemed to view non-pistonic behavior as causing significant losses in information, and simultaneously responsible for the heightened sensitivity of a lot of drivers (i.e., that some of those dBs of sensitivity are distortion).  He mentioned that a major objective is to bring pistonic behavior into the lower-cost designs, leading me to hope that upgrade packages might because available for the 3A Sigs.  :)    

After the chat, Johnny R had a demo running of the 7s set up with the new Vandy subs ("System 9" is what he was calling it), Vandy amps, AR Reference preamp, and Aesthetix phono-pre.  (Sorry, I missed the specifics of the pre and the analog rig; I did notice that it was a Benz LP cartridge.)  They were playing the MoFi one-step pressing of Fagen's The Nightly--it was probably the best sound I've ever heard in my 25+ years in this hobby.  The midrange and high frequency clarity was just unreal.  After "New Frontier" played, the whole room had to pick their collective jaw up from the ground.

Kudos to RV, Johnny R and the whole Audio Connection for putting on such a fantastic event, and for setting up the demo system so well.