Which tubes? My amp can except El34, 6L6, KT88, an

Maxgain, that's very interesting about how the Vandy's amps get their signal. Perhaps the 6L6 wouldn't be the best in this situation. They are cheap to experiment with though. I found the Golden Dragon KT88 to have as much bottom end as a Sovtek 6550. The Sovtek seemed a little compressed. But the Svetlana 6550 is great. Very linear. Better slam factor than the KT88.

Kana's suggestion of the KT90 is a good one too, if you can run them. Make sure you get the type 3, matched and tested. They have some quality/reliability issues, but the ones I got from Upscale Audio were very nice. They took a long, long time to burn in and settle down, perhaps 300 hours or so. But in the end, they offered a solid state like low end, and great linearity. In a Sonic Frontiers SFS-40, they outperformed a pair of bridged Adcom GFA-555's in the low end!

Creeper, the Svetlana 6550c is what I use in my amp.It was voiced with those tubes though so I leave well enough alone. I hear that in the right amp the Electro Harmonix 6550 is very good too. But it has to be the right amp! A friend tried them and a first it was great, as they burned in though the sound got real thin and nasty over the course of a few weeks. He has an ARC VT60. He asked ARC about it and they told him that they had the same results with the Electro's in the VT100. Seems to be a lot of variation in different brands, let alone different types of tubes. Makes a recomendation for someone else pretty complicated.

Maxgain, I have the Vandys low end set a 1 with the V12i. This maybe more of a room issue than an amplifier issue. I also used a Rives setup cd and a Radio Shack sound pressure meter to adjust the multiple subs settings. I like the EL34 tubes and retubed with NOS with excellent results. Good luck

I'd also love to hear Rec's Vandys.

Didn't know about V5's crossover pulling it's signal off the output of the main amp, I thought it was line level from the preamp.

I'm running KT-90 type 3 in my SF Power One SE, and they're just starting to settle down and sound as Creeper describes above.

Question for the Vandy guys: I saw a picture from a recent
audio show with a speaker Vandersteen was calling the Signature One, which was the top section of the V5s, but
there's no mention of it on their website. Is it a real
product?

Creeper, if you wan't to do some reading about the way the powered woofer on the 5 is set up, the review in "The Absolute Sound" explains it quite well. It can be found at the Vandersteen web site. I realize after some reading myself that the Vandersteen 5 comes with the model 5, high pass filter, that goes between your amp and pre-amp.I understand that these are very transparent unlike the crappy little WX-2 supplied as a temporary filter for the 2Wq.