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Vandersteen
The design and physical appearance of
their speakers have proven to be very flexible as the small amount of exposed wood
allows them to blend into and complement a wide variety of decors. (See us for information on custom finishes.) Due their popularity and wide
acceptance, other companies have tried to make their speakers look like
Vandersteens. But don’t be fooled, behind the grille there is a box speaker with
all the box speaker problems.
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Every Vandersteen loudspeaker is designed to be as accurate and as
true to the original music, voice or sound as possible. To do this, they had to
abandon conventional loudspeaker engineering concepts with their inherent
limitations and develop new designs with greater performance potential. As you
can see in the cut-away picture, Vandersteen speakers have a very unique
internal design. They discovered that the baffle holding and surrounding the
drivers in a conventional speaker affects the sound of the drivers just like
holding CD cases on either side of your mouth affects your voice. Mounting the
drivers in individual, minimum-sized, curved-edge enclosures rather than a
baffle or front panel dramatically reduces early reflections and diffraction and
significantly improves our loudspeakers’ performance. This boxless mounting of
the drivers provides an open sound and allows the texture and dynamics of each
instrument, sound and voice to be reproduced with astonishing detail and
transparency. To insure that the outputs from the different drivers all reach
the listener at exactly the same instant, the individual driver enclosures are
staggered to perfectly align the drivers. The aligned drivers are all connected
in positive phase so that they push and pull in unison. 
Each frequency range is reproduced by a single driver
to escape the detrimental effects of multi-driver interference. Above the
omni-directional deepest bass, the drivers all fire forward to insure easy
placement and avoid the distortions and response variations of multi-directional
(bi-polar) designs. Round dowels support the open-center wood top and
acoustically transparent grille cloth. The surface areas of the dowels and wood
top are minimized to insure that their vibrations are not audible. Although it
has often been shown that anything round—like a broom handle—leaned up against a
speaker is inaudible, they have set the dowels at carefully calculated distances
and angles from the drivers to insure that they do not cause any audible
interference. So while the
Vandersteen design does not lend itself to the
currently popular narrow look, the narrow speakers that simply round their
baffles, cover their baffles with an absorbent material or use fitted grille
frames to reduce diffraction do not offer the uncompromised performance of our
aligned, baffleless, phase-correct design. Beyond the sonic advantages,
their design also allows a distinctive look that is cost effective and visually
pleasing. In a conventional speaker, the wood veneered cabinet is often the most
expensive component. (Over 65% of the total manufacturing cost.) The veneer
takes considerable time and skill to finish and the entire cabinet is useless if
it is even slightly scratched or dented during assembly. With their unique
construction and grille cloth wrapped finish, our cabinets account for less than
16% of the total manufacturing cost. They are able to invest these huge savings in
the drivers and crossover parts directly responsible for sound quality. With
better critical components than many speakers costing three times as much, each
Vandersteen model is an exemplary value offering superior performance,
reliability and consistency.