Which integrated Amp for Vandersteen 2ce Sig2 ?


Am currently using a Marantz PM15S1 to drive these speakers - very bright, airy, detailed BUT thin and once its gets into symphony / orchestra music, its messy. Otherwise, for simple femalevocals and jazz, its beautiful.

Hv auditioned the below

- Ayre 7xe
- BAT vx300
- Marantz PM11S1
- NAD M3
- Luxman L-590u Class A
- Musical Fidelity A5.5
- Musical Fidelity A1

Price increase simply cannot justify the sound improvement....am now looking at the below -

Pass Labs int-150
Gryphon Diablo
Luxman L-590u

Any comments ....
art80342

Showing 3 responses by ablang

Agree with Raindance about placement. Assuming you have the Sound Anchors stands, make sure you have the tilt-back set appropriately for the distance of your listening position and height of your ears from the floor. If the speakers are too upright the tweeter might be emphasized as it aims at your ears--and you can lose the speakers' time coherence.

At a distance of eight feet and with a low couch, my 2ceSig2s are tilted back three inches (the manual explains this procedure well), which was a night and day difference over two inches. You'll hear everything cohere when you get it right.
Art80342,

If any other Vandie users can jump in with their experience, I'd be happy, but my sense of it when I got it right was that there was an overall balance to the sound--a smoothness from top to bottom, with nothing exaggerated or edgy at all. With the tweeters aimed too directly at your ears, you might hear a disjointedness between the treble and mids, even as if the frequencies are coming from different depths within the soundstage--and the treble can certainly be accentuated.

I'm listening to Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue right now, and the only thing even at a high volume that has any edge to it is the few moments where Burrell's guitar clips his amp--and that's only natural to the sound of a loud, clean electric guitar being pushed to its dynamic limits. If I lift up off my seat, the cymbals and guitar take on a flat, harsh texture. Settle back in, they're smooth as can be. I think the time-alignment might actually best be heard in the "air" on recordings--it seems like a part of the whole cloth of the sonic picture when it's right, and almost like grain otherwise.

If it helps, from where I'm sitting right now, looking through the grill cloth at the white wall behind, the angle of the top of the mid-driver's cabinet is aimed at or just above my ear-level. That's hit it just right for me. Try messing with the tilt-back an inch or half an inch at a time, and see what sounds right. Heretical as it might be to say, if all else fails you might try dialing back the treble driver on the back of each speaker by a dB or more, which I do for some "hot" rock or pop recordings; it doesn't suck out any particular frequency like an eq, it just draws down the whole range of that driver's volume. The graphs on the Stereophile review show this pretty well.

Hope this helps--and happy listening.
Art80342,

If you're asking about associated equipment, my setup is more modest than yours--the Vandies with an NAD C372 fed by a Sony Playstation 1 (I know, I know, but I'd replace it if there was a single thing wrong with its sound). If you mean room setup, I'll echo again what Eagleman6722 said about tilt back. For initial room placement, I used the Vandersteen manual's room measurement suggestions, then moved them around from there and adjusted tilt-back till everything cohered as I described. Good luck with it.