Finish Quality of Von Schweikert VR4jr's

That was the whole point of my post. I lovve the sound, but the damned things are way too easily scratched. I wiped the top of one with my shirt to remove the dust, and my shirt button left a scratch!..Just a durable coating to protect the finish is all I ask. And at this price, I feel that is a reasonable expectation.
Mine are in the Dark cherry finish, and a scratch shows perhaps more than on the lighter finish.

I beg to differ, as well...My VR4JRS are well finished, look & sound great and have no scratches.This thread tries to make them sound and look cheap - These are just as nice as my previous Thiel 2.4 or Legacy Focus -If they appeared as cheap as whats been advertised here I would have sold them long ago - Their sound is major league and would hold up against many more $ models...Let the flames begin...

Yes, the Cherry veneer is way too revealing of flaws, and I think the speakers should be finished better, particularly the Cherry. My pair is African Hazelwood, and they were a handpicked pair. My finish is quite good, but I do agree there could be more coats of a better urethane.

I will admit that I admire the speakers that have topnotch woods & finishing, but I don't know that I could find a speaker of the sound & driver quality level of the VRjr for $4000 retail. Let me know if there is....

Slightly off topic, but with this many 4jr owners on the thread it's a perfect opportunity. I just picked up a brand new pair of the jr's and love them. They are just about broken in. By a bad twist of fate and an accident on my dealer's part I ended up with a non serial matched pair. In case there are other owners out there that didn't know this, the speakers come in matched pairs with matching L and R serial numbers. Once I noticed that mine weren't a matched pair, I really noticed the difference between the two speakers. Both look great on their own, but the grain on the African hazelwood is dramatically different between the two. My dealer told me that even his pair with matched serials don't match exactly between the two speakers. All you owners out there, how do yours look compared to each other?

Despite matching serials, the veneer on my pair is fairly amateur work. Not only do the L & R cabinets differ, but the top/bottom within the same channel are poorly matched.

I'm not losing any sleep over it at their price point.

With all due respect, what was written above about the pittance it would cost to produce the jrs with a 'high-quality' finish just ain't so. A couple extra coats of cheap poly will not look any more impressive and will scratch as easily as one (there are already more coats of sealer and top coat than what you might think.) The cost of some better urethane is cheap enough, but the element of cost is time. A quality several step finish cannot be applied in an hour. No possible way. You're talking days. That costs money.

One species of veneer is only a couple pennies more than another, but when you take into consideration the cost of a higher grade of veneer (one of the major problems here), sorting, waste and hiring someone who knows what they are doing to do the matching, you're talking money. I don't have specific dollar amounts here, but just a jump from 'B' to 'AA' veneer is going to triple or quadruple the cost. That ain't hay.

If VSA could magically transform a cheap finish into one of high-quality at the cost of a lousy $100 to the end user, they would do so in a heartbeat. They would be stupid to ignore a simple, cheap solution to one of the model's greatest weaknesses.

By the way, take a look some Chinese furniture next time your out shopping. None of it I've ever seen is what I would call 'furniture quality.'