Visiting one of Tokyo’s oldest jazz kissas with filmmaker Nick Dwyer… Last November, I spent an evening visiting listening bars with my friend Nick Dwyer, a New Zealand-born, […]
Vandersteen 1Ci Speakers: A Logical Choice for Newbies
American-made floorstanding loudspeakers offer a taste high-end audio for under $2,000.
I know I’ve been harping on “affordability” a lot recently on eCoustics. Boring. Yawn. I get it. But as I was watching a superb video from Cheapaudioman the other night at 3 a.m., I realized that there is a growing movement within the community that understands that high-end audio can’t grow without a serious conversation about affordability and teaching people how to properly build a system within a budget that doesn’t involve selling a kidney.
I’ve been there. On the other side. During 7 years of insanity in my mid-30s, I spent more than $70,000 on high-end audio/video equipment.
How much of it do I own today? Zero.
I feel pretty stupid about it to be quite frank. I had multiple pairs of perfectly fine MartinLogan loudspeakers that I am on some fanatical quest to reclaim and start from scratch with again.
Do you want to know why?
Because there was nothing wrong with them.
None of us hate really expensive high-end products. Some of them really push the performance envelope and that’s a good thing if the technology eventually trickles down into products that are more affordable.
But is that really happening on the loudspeaker side?
I see it on the digital front with better quality DACs getting more affordable; Schiit Audio, Denafrips, Helm Audio, and many others should take a bow.
People getting into high-end audio for the first time do have a lot of quality affordable loudspeakers to select from in 2021, but once you get out of that category, the prices escalate rather quickly.
How many people jump from $500 speakers to $2,000 or $5,000 speakers?
The more I think about it — the more I understand the interest in used high-end and vintage components, but the flip side to all of that is that demand is pushing prices a lot higher.
I desperately want a pair of MartinLogan Aerius i (oak finish) in great condition; but I’m not going to pay a stupid price for them because I will need to replace the panels almost immediately because they were designed to only last 15 years.
What about Vandersteen? I wrote about the Vandersteen 1Ci speakers in my recent Audiophile System Builder column and the feedback from a number of readers was that it was about time that someone in the audio press covered these speakers which are still in production.
The Vandersteen 1Ci speakers are not old enough to qualify as vintage audio (give them another 12 years and they will) but these American-made floorstanders are almost 8 years old at this point and still very much in production. The Vandersteen 1C were available back in 1996 so the earliest versions of the speaker are almost as old as the generation who probably need to listen to them the most.
The Vandersteen 2 (and all of its variants) loudspeakers have been in production since 1977 with more than 100,000 pairs sold; a remarkable number that very few high-end brands could ever hit with even their entire lineup.
This article originally appeared at ecoustics.com and an intro has been published here with permission.
Read the full article: https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/vandersteen-1ci-speakers/
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