Vandersteen 5a's - an upgrade from Vienna mahlers?

With the Vandersteen, the woofer amp and all components can be field repaired or taken out and returned to the factory if need be. You don't have to ship the speaker-thank God! Vandersteen has been in business since 1977. I really don't think he will be going anywhere until his retirement considering his success to this point.
As I said, each to his own. However, I personally will buy the Vandersteen's. The 5a's ARE more furniture if that rocks your boat. However, I don't think the rest of the Vandersteen line is that bad looking compared to some of the other offerings in the market (ie; electrostatics)and I'm not in this for show. I for one buy for sound not furniture. If the two coincide, so be it.
As for ported vs sealed bass, the only place ported will win out is in shear volume---that's it.

The link to Israel Blume's comments about side-firing woofers referenced in my last post did not come through -- here it is again:

http://www.coincidentspeaker.com/whatsnew.html#Anchor--The-39790

"I lived with time-aligned speakers for six years and do not care for their tiny sweet spot" - and I'm new to them and can't seem to locate this "tiny sweet spot". My 3A Sigs sound wonderful in or not in my sweet/spot - seat.

"The Vandys' use of both first-order crossovers and a sealed-box design limit dynamics and that is unacceptable to me" - like in the other thread, I'm not hearing this limited dynamic knock on the Vandy. From jazz, to classical, to acoustic , to rock and roll, none of it sounds limited to me. Now, factor poorly recorded music into the mix, and they will tell you about it. If I love the artist/the song enough, I don't much care - I just won't use it to try and show my system off. Put on Ray Brown - Solar Energy or Eva Cassidy's Songbird - well what's limited there? Absolutly nothing.

I know of NO manufacture that will not say his design is the best compromise. However, as Sean says, some basic research is required into such design when you are going to spend this kind of money.
I can only say from my research that [I] will stick with sealed designs. I have spent considerable time with the 5a. It does not have a small sweet spot(of course, personally, I haven't found any Vandersteen to have that small of sweet spot if set up correctly.) It is dynamic, transparent and has some of the best bass I have ever heard from a speaker system. It also reproduces voices as good as I have ever heard with the proper height and width and a amazing holographic soundstage. It will play considerably louder than other Vandersteen's(if you are in to that.)
By the way, I have a set of Advent "The New Advent" (circa 70's) and let us hope we have come a little ways since then. They were excellent in their time but not up to todays standard. But even back then, a ported speaker couldn't deliver the bass it would.

Dunlavy's have some inherit design flaws that can only be ameliorated by designing the height of the room around them. This has to do with room nodes and room reinforcement. The same goes for any speaker that uses a woofer that is measurably above ground level.

Side mounted woofers were first utilized by AR ( as far as i know ), but they did their homework in terms of the how's and why's of why this can work and be beneficial. One of the requirements that one must deal with in such a situation though is a very low and sharp crossover frequency. Designs that don't take advantage of such an approach are bound to have both room placement problems in terms of low frequencies and the potential for cancellation due to lobing. Having said that, there is something to be said for the sound of a direct radiator that indirect radiation can't match, even at low frequencies.

Other than that, we could continue this thread on forever. The fact that you are comparing your multi-thousand dollar modern speakers to 30+ year old 10 inch two ways ( Advent's ) really has me scratching my head. As to the Dunlavy's, unless you had about 1000 wpc feeding them, you've never really heard what the speakers were capable of. The compression that you were hearing was the amplifier giving out, not the speaker.

As to the design compromises involved with various approaches, ports can not match the linearity of a sealed design, even if the ported design is fully optimized. All a port does is to destabilize the air spring within the box, introduce uncontrolled leakage, produce an uncontrolled resonance and increase the potential for woofer damage if fed a signal below the resonant frequency of the vent. The end result of such an approach is that bass is extended and "may" play louder, but the quality of bass suffers in most every aspect. The drawback to sealed designs is that they are inefficient and require greater amounts of power to obtain the same amount of amplitude output. Pay your money and make your decisions. Sean
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