Sonus Faber Amati Homage versus Vandersteen 5A

DBK:
Ive heard the SF speakers in showrooms as well as in friends homes. They're good speakers, but would definitely not be my choice even now. I own Vandie 5s and will upgrade to 5As ASAP.

I suggest that you invest a small fraction of the cost of any of these speakers and travel to your local dealers or to ones who you want to work with. See what you like the most in demos and narrow it down from there. Also, consider who you're buying from. Make sure you're comfortable with their post purchase policies and setup of your purchase. In other words, know what to expect once you place your order.

The speakers you're considering are all VERY differnt from an engineering perspective. I suggest you take that into account because it will make a difference when you match them to your system and room.

Good Luck!

Boy, why do we get such dust-ups every time someone mentions "time aligned." As far as I am concerned, time aligned means the music sounds like early 19th century when playing Beethoven and the 1960's when doing Allman Bros.
What difference does the actual technical detail make?

A few years ago I heard a big Dunlavy speaker that, according to Stereophiles test, was easily the most technically perfect speaker ever tested -- flat on axis frequency response, no resonances in the waterfall time/frequency response test, and a virtually perfect right triange for the impulse response test (the essence of time alignment). You guessed it, the speaker sounded very disappointing.

"Time alignment," for dynamic speakers, like the Vandersteen, requires both the physical alignment of the drivers to be equidistant to the listener's ears at some point in space, and the use of 6db/octave crossover to preserve phase coherence. This means that each driver is covering a lot of the range that is being covered by another driver. This has its own set of problems--demands on driver operating out of its ideal range (cone breakup is bad for everything, including time alignment), comb filtering effects from the drivers having different acoustic centers and dispersion patterns, etc. For time aligned drivers to effectively integrate, one would have to be on axis and sitting relatively far back; if this means one is out of the nearfield, then reflects from the floor, ceiling, walls, etc., will pretty much destroy theoretical time alignment. In theory, I suppose the large crossover overlap could also damage "time alignment" by exacerbating doppler effects. If I were a theoretical purist, I would insist on my time aligned speakers being set up in a large anechoic chamber.

I have not really heard a correlation between "time alignment" and what I subjectively like, so I treat it as irrelevant. That said, I rather like the Vandersteen 5A, though I like my own non-time aligned speakers better. By the way, given the location and complex loading of the 5A's woofer, can anyone explain how it is really time aligned, anyway?

My 2 cents.....I heard both the Vandersteen and Amati Homage. I preferred the Vandersteens by a wide margin. I was disappointed with the Amati's (and I heard them at two dealers). However, I am sure that with carful set up and electronics some of us can make them sing!!!! And the Vandersteens as well!!!