Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers
Transcription
Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers
ON TEST Von Schweikert VR-35 ‘ ‘EXPORT DELUXE’ LOUDSPEAKERS W hen you buy a pair of Von Schweikert speakers, it seems to me that you’re not so much buying a pair of speakers as becoming a part of the Von Schweikert family. If you call or email the company, you’ll get the personal attention of either the designer, Albert Von Schweikert, or his son Damon. And it appears to me that if you buy a pair of Von Schweikert speakers in the USA, where they build their speakers by hand, it’s not unusual for one of the two (or both!) to call on customers personally, either to install speakers or sort out room positioning issues. Here in Australia, although the Von Schweik- 34 erts are only an email or phone call away, the personal local touch is provided by the genial Geoff Doherty of Cardoh, who is their official Australian distributor. THE EQuiPMEnT The Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe speakers are large. Very large. To be specific, they’re 1270mm high, 406mm wide and 302mm deep. They’re also heavy. Very heavy. Again, to be specific, each one weighs 54kg. The finish is a ‘cloth wrap’ but whereas most cloth wrap speakers allow owners to remove the cloth, Von Schweikert has glued its cloth in place. My samples were finished in a black cloth, which made them look rather forbidding. Von Schweikert has other options available, the standard ones being ‘Platinum’ coloured cloth with brushed aluminium coloured end plates and ‘Mocha’ coloured cloth with similarly coloured matching end plates. The company will apparently also mix and match the cloths and end plates for you. The cloth wrap made it impossible for me to dissemble the cabinets, as I usually do with all the speakers I review, so I cannot give any information about the drivers other than that supplied by Von Schweikert itself. According to Von Schweikert, the front baffle houses two 150mm bass/midrange drivers, arrayed Australian HF May12_034 Test Von.indd 34 9/05/2012 12:27:55 PM Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers ‘ in MTM format around a single 25mm silk dome tweeter. Von Schweikert says the bass midrange drivers have cast frames and that the cones are laminated, using wood pulp, carbon-fibre powder and a rubber surface treatment. At the rear of the speaker is a moderately large vent. Below this vent, but invisible behind the black cloth, is a woofer that Von Schweikert says is 150mm in diameter and is manufactured by Tymphany (Peerless). I am not a great fan of cloth wrap, but I appreciate that it allows manufacturers to reduce their manufacturing costs, provides almost fail-safe mechanical protection for the drivers in the cabinet and ensures customers have a long-lasting finish. However, it appears that counterfeiters are great fans of cloth wrap—for the obvious reason! In fact the Von Schweikert Audio website carries the following warning: ‘It has come to our attention that cloners have been reselling unauthorized and inferior copies of several of our speaker models through unscrupulous dealers advertising on the Internet on various resale sites.’ The lesson is to buy only from Geoff Doherty at Cardoh! The crossover used in the VR-35 is unusual for two reasons. Firstly, the rearfiring bass driver’s high-frequency response is rolled off by a single large inductor that has been designed to start rolling off the bass driver at 80Hz. This means that the slope would be first-order, or 6dB per octave. Secondly, the low-frequency response of the two front-firing bass/midrange drivers is not filtered at all, so they receive all the low frequencies as well as all of the midrange up to 6kHz, after which the tweeter takes over the high-frequency duties. This means that conceptually, you could think of the VR-35 design as a small two-way full-range loudspeaker (the front-firing drivers) plus, in the same cabinet, a separate unpowered lowfrequency driver. This is an extremely unusual—possibly even unique—design for a loudspeaker because it means that two completely different drivers, with different cone sizes, different resonant frequencies, different frequency and phase responses and different distortion spectra will be reproducing exactly the same musical notes. And these are notes that are contained within an extremely important section of the audible range: one which contains almost all of the most tonally significant musical information (from C2 at 65.4Hz to around C6 at 1.046kHz). However, perhaps even more significantly—and also uniquely—the different drivers are also located in completely different positions on the cabinet, so there will also be a time delay at the listening position when the same note is produced simultaneously by both drivers. This time delay between the front-firing and rear-firing drivers essentially means that at the listening position, you will get a few milliseconds of delay between the three drivers. So whereas most manufacturers like to time-align their drivers, it seems to me that Von Schweikert has deliberately introduced significant time delays. If, like me, you were a bit confused about the name of this speaker, and why it is an ‘Export Deluxe’ model, I was assured by Albert Von Schweikert himself that this is the only version of the VR-35 his company makes. That is, there is no ‘non-deluxe’ version, nor is there a ‘non-export’ version manufactured solely for sale in the USA… which then, of course, begs the question as to why the speakers’ model name is not just plain ol’ ‘VR-35’. lisTEninG sEssions It didn’t take me too long to work out why Von Schweikert offers a 90day home trial. ON TEST VoN SCHWeiKerT Vr-35 EXPORT DELUXE LOUDSPEAKERS Brand: Von Schweikert model: VR-35 Export Deluxe Category: Floorstanding Loudspeakers rrP: $9,988.00 Warranty: Five Years Distributor: Cardoh Pty Ltd address: 11 Day Street Wentworth Falls NSW 2782 (04) 0838 6977 (02) 4757 1710 [email protected] www.cardoh.com.au • Upper midrange • Spatial delivery • Cabinet finish LAB REPORT Readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers should continue on and read the LABORATORY REPORT published on page 50. Readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/or displayed using graphs and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested. Lab Report on page 50 avhub.com.au HF May12_034 Test Von.indd 35 35 9/05/2012 12:27:55 PM ON TEST Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers First and foremost, of course, is the fact that Von Schweikert says its speakers do not give of their best until after you’ve put at least 500 hours on the clock. It also says that you have to move them around until they have ‘dialled into your room.’ Von Schweikert then goes on to say that if the VR-35 speakers sound ‘hard’ in the upper midrange and treble, that this will be because ‘there are some brands of electronics which ‘sound hard in the upper midrange and treble’ and that you should ‘avoid overly-detailed, harsh-sounding transistor amps.’ The company also suggests that if you place the speakers too close to corners, you may hear excessive bass power, in which case you should purchase some Dacron Polyfil stuffing from a fabric store and completely block the rear port. V-S also recommends against using silver cables, which it says ‘may also cause bright sound.’ According to Geoff Doherty, the samples he loaned me for this review already had 500 hours on them, by virtue of having been used as demonstrators in Doherty’s own home and having been run virtually nonstop during last year’s Melbourne Hi-Fi Show, where they were the demonstration speakers in the Von Schweikert room. Positioning the speakers in my room took an inordinately long time, not because they were so heavy (though this was a factor) but because I was not happy with the sound of the VR-35s in any of the positions that have proved to work well for just about every other speaker I have auditioned. I eventually ended up positioning the VR-35s around three metres apart, and precisely three centimetres from the rear wall, with the backs of the speakers parallel with the wall (that is, I didn’t toe the speakers in towards the listening position at all.) I confess I still was not entirely happy with the bass of the speakers in this position— particularly given the cabinet size, the size and number of the bass drivers and the price—and, before you ask, yes, I did try the so-called ‘Klipschorn Solution’ (placing the speakers in corners to improve the bass) but when I did I found that the lower mid-bass became far too prominent and that it really didn’t increase the deep bass significantly. Once finally positioned in my room where I felt they sounded the best, I found the sound of the Von Schweikert VR-35s was not only very distinctive but also completely different from any other speakers I can remember hearing. It was so different that I completely gave up on comparing the VR35s with other loudspeakers in the standard time-honoured A–B fashion, because the sound was so completely different that there didn’t seem to be any point. This in itself proved to be interesting because (and I have to get somewhat ahead of myself to explain this), it was only when I stopped making A–B comparisons that I discovered another reason why it might be that Von Schweikert wants you to hang on to the speakers for three months before making a final decision to purchase them. That reason is that, quite simply, the longer I listened solely and exclusively to the VR-35s, the more I became accustomed to the way they sounded. In hindsight, this is a fairly obvious conclusion, but it had not occurred to me that it was a technique that could be used to help sell loudspeakers. When I mentioned this to a friend who’s a psychiatrist, she confirmed this and said there’s also a wellknown psychological factor at work in requiring owners move the speakers around and carefully select their electronics, because apparently behavioural psychologists say that people have a strong internalised notion that effort equals quality. ‘People believe that if effort is put in, the result is higher quality,’ she said. And indeed once I became accustomed to the sound of the VR-35s my overarching impression was of a large and majestic sound field that delivered impressively room-filling sound, a bit like Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ approach. I could not hear any inconsistencies in the midrange sound, which seemed to me to be tonally accurate. However, the extreme high frequencies were to my ears a little soft at my listening position. Angling the speakers in slightly mostly corrected this, but this in turn upset the bass. In the end I moved the speakers closer towards each other, which redressed both issues. Conclusion When I checked out Von Schweikert’s website, I discovered that with one exception, every other Von Schweikert speaker is ‘conventionally’ designed, by which I mean all their drivers are mounted on the front baffle and the cabinets are not swathed in cloth but have the usual high-quality wood veneer finishes found on most other speakers. Puzzled about the ‘odd man out’ nature of the VR-35, I delved deeper and found that the VR-35 looks a lot like the ‘Vortex Screen’ speakers that put Von Schweikert’s first company (Vortex Acoustics) on the map back in the 1980s. Who was it who said that speaker designers don’t have sentimental favourites? greg borrowman Home Trial Sales In the USA, the Von Schweikerts use an unusual business model to sell their speakers. The company sells mostly direct via a ‘90-day Home Trial’ system, but there is another sales model that involves the Von Schweikerts offering potential customers an allexpenses-paid weekend in California. This works as follows, according to the website: ‘Bring a loved one with you for a weekend to visit our factory showroom in sunny Southern California. Spend one or two days listening to any of the Von Schweikert audio components in our spacious sound room. If you’ve never been to southern California before, take the second day to see the sights and fully enjoy your get-away weekend. The cost of your travel, food and accommodation for two fun-filled days will be deducted from your purchase price.’ Unfortunately for Australians, this particular offer applies only to Von Schweikert customers in the US and Canada and then also only for certain (non-specified) models! And if you don’t end up purchasing the speakers, you have to pay for your weekend get-away. Here in Australia, the offer is more modest: Cardoh offers no-obligation auditions in the distributor’s own home in the beautiful Blue Mountains of NSW, some three hours west of Sydney, using a Jolida JD1000RC valve amp and Killer DAC. Cardoh’s Geoff Doherty told us that he will pick up customers who fly in to Sydney’s Mascot airport and drive them back after their audition at no charge and with no obligation to purchase the speakers… but says that this offer is subject to his availability at the time of your arrival at the airport. As for the 90-day Home Trial approval system that is available to Australian customers, Cardoh says: ‘This trial is not a “loaner” program, so if you’re not really in the market to purchase new speakers, this offer will not apply.’ Indeed to qualify for the 90-day Home Trial you have to pay the full purchase price of the speakers upfront before the speakers will be shipped to you. After your speakers have arrived, you have to keep them for the full 90 days, and also play them at moderate (but unspecified) volume levels for at least 500 hours. Then if you don’t like them for any reason, you have to call Von Schweikert before returning the speakers to discuss your ancillary equipment, your room, and other factors Von Schweikert feels might adversely affect the performance of their speakers. If, after all this, you still decide to return the speakers, Cardoh will deduct the full cost of shipping the speakers to and from your home, plus the cost of repairs should any damage have occurred during the 90-day trial or during shipping. Australia being the size it is, return shipping costs will vary from a minimum of around $450 for Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane metropolitan regions to up to $1,400 if you live in Darwin or a remote country location. LAB REPORT ON PAGE 50 36 Australian HF May12_034 Test Von.indd 36 9/05/2012 12:27:56 PM LAB REPORT Von Schweikert VR-35 Export Deluxe Loudspeakers CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34 TEST RESULTS Because it appears loading is important to the low-frequency performance of the VR35, Newport Test Labs was asked to test the low-frequency performance not in its standard anechoic test environment, but in a room, with the speaker placed diagonally across a corner, then with its back three centimetres from a wall, then with the speaker two metres from a rear wall. The results of these tests are shown in Graph 1. You can see that in the corner position (red trace), there’s a significant (7.5dB) lift in the region 40–250Hz, whereas with the speaker two metres from a rear wall (green trace), the bass response rolls off very rapidly, and begins doing so right up at 1kHz. The black trace (where the speaker was 3cm from a rear wall) 110 Overall, the frequency response of the VR-35, as measured by Newport Test Labs, extends from 26Hz to 30kHz ±4dB, which is a very good result indeed. has a ‘suck-out’ between 60Hz and 200Hz, but is the flattest overall, so that the trace shown extends from 35Hz to 10kHz ±3dB. (In this case, 10kHz is the upper graphing limit. The high-frequency response of the VR-35 is shown in Graph 2 and Graph 6). The trace showing the high-frequency response of the VR-35 that’s shown in Graph 2 extends from 500Hz (the lower graphing limit) to 30kHz±5dB. As you can see there dBSPL Newpor Ne wport T wpor Test est Labs 105 100 100 95 95 90 90 85 85 80 80 75 75 70 70 65 65 60 60 55 55 50 50 20 Hz 50 100 200 500 1K 2K 5K dBSPL 110 105 Newpor wport T wpor Test est Labs 20 Hz 50 100 200 500 1K 2K 5K Graph 4. Low frequency response of upper (blue trace) and lower (green trace) front-firing bass/midrange drivers. Nearfield acquisition. [V [Von Schweikert VR-35 Loudspeaker] Graph 1. Frequency response for three different room positions. In a corner (red trace); 3cm from a rear wall (black trace); and two metres from a rear wall (green trace). Signal source band-limited pink noise. Upper graph limit 10kHz. [V [Von Schweikert VR-35] 110 are peaks at 1kHz (+4dB), 3.8–5.5kHz (+4dB), 12.5kHz ((+4.5dB) and dips at 2.5kHz (–2.5dB), 8.5kHz (–5dB) and 16kHz (–3dB). I suspect these may be partially caused by reflections from the beading that keeps the cloth raised away from the tweeter and bass/ midrange drivers, but further examination was prohibited by the difficulty of accurately locating microphone with relation to the drivers because of the fixed grille cloth. dBSPL Newpor wport T Test est Labs Ohm 20 Deg Newpor Ne wport T wpor Test est Labs 105 150 100 120 95 90 90 60 85 30 10 80 9 75 8 70 7 65 6 60 0 -30 -60 -90 -120 5 -150 55 50 500 Hz 1K 2K 5K 10K 20K 30K 4 10 Hz 20 50 100 200 500 1K 2K 5K 10K 20K -180 30K Graph 5. Impedance modulus of left (red trace) and right (yellow trace) speakers plus phase (blue trace). Black trace under is reference 4-ohm precision resistor. [VR-35] Graph 2. High-frequency response, expanded view. w. T Test stimulus gated sine. Microphone placed at three metres on-axis with tweeter. Lower measurement limit 500Hz. [VR-35] 110 180 dBSPL Newpor Ne wport T wpor Test est Labs 110 105 105 100 100 95 95 dBSPL Newpor Ne wport T wpor Test est Labs 90 90 85 85 80 80 75 75 70 70 65 65 60 60 55 55 50 50 10 Hz 20 50 100 200 500 Graph 3. Low frequency response of rear-firing bass reflex port (red trace) and rear-firing woofer (black trace). Nearfield acquisition. Port/woofer levels not compensated for differences in radiating areas. [V [Von Schweikert VR-35 Loudspeaker] 50 1K 20 Hz 50 100 200 500 1K 2K 5K 10K 20K 30K Graph 6. Composite response plot. Yello Y w trace is output of bass reflex port. Pink trace is anechoic response of rear-facing bass driver. Green trace is anechoic response of frontfiring woofer. Light blue trace is anechoic response of midrange driver. Red trace is gated (simulated anechoic) response above 600Hz. Black trace is averaged in-room pink noise response. [V [Von Schweikert VR-35 Loudspeaker] Australian HF May12_034 Test Von.indd 50 9/05/2012 12:28:48 PM you’d expect from the design. The classic ‘bass reflex’ tuning is reflected in the peaks at 16Hz and 44Hz and the dip at 26Hz, but the severe extra dip at 70Hz to almost 4Ω is anything but classic. Also, the relatively high impedance below 50Hz will place considerable demands on the amplifier for voltage. Between 200Hz and 550Hz, the speaker will demand current, with the impedance dipping below 5Ω to reach nearly 4Ω at 300Hz. Actually, other than below 100Hz, the impedance rises above 8Ω only between 1.2kHz and 3kHz. The phase angle is well-controlled to within ±30° except at 60Hz, where it briefly strays to –60°. The pair matching is very good, but not perfect. (If it were perfect, the red and yellow traces would lie on top of each other, rather than diverging.) Loudspeaker efficiency was very slightly above average with Newport Test Labs measuring 87.5dBSPL at one metre for an input of 2.83Veq. Graph 6 is a composite. The various measurements have been overlaid via postprocessing to show a picture of how each contributes to the overall response of the speakers, and they show that overall, the frequency response of the VR-35, as measured by Newport Test Labs, extends from 26Hz to 30kHz ±4dB, which is a very good Steve Holding result indeed. REVIEWED ProAc Response D Two British to their bones… B.M.C. C1 Integra ted A very unusual amplifier! VAF MPB SW4 Sub A bargain in black? TDK LOR NC-150 Low-cost noise-ca ncelling headphones... ... SHINE ON Vivid EETER MOND TW 2 B&W’S DIA F THE 80 TOPS OF 5 Reviews! DD-15+ • Velodyne • B&W 802 ve io PerfectWa • PS Aud Pearl Lite • Marantz e 2500 Mov Pure • ort Rep Show l Audio Show UK Nationa KR Audio e… s are mad How valve Jan/Feb 2012 Audio B1 Extraordinary deta il and resolution! CES SHOW REPORT Eveanna Manley launches Chinook! Mar/Apr 2012 $7.95 Graph 3 shows the nearfield response of the rear-facing driver and the rear-facing port. You can see that the low-frequency response of the driver rolls off below 50Hz at around 12dB/octave. The upper frequency response starts rolling off above 140Hz, but it’s very slowly rolled off, so the response is only 10dB down at 550Hz. The output of the port is lower than I would have expected, but it should assist bass between 20Hz and 70Hz. The low-frequency nearfield response of the two front-firing drivers is shown in Graph 4. Interestingly, the drivers do not seem to be operating in parallel (or series). Instead, the uppermost of the two drivers has a more extended low-frequency response than the lower of the two drivers. It’s almost as if the topmost driver was a ‘bass’ driver and the bottom-most a ‘midrange’ driver. I can’t see why the drivers appear to have been ‘swapped’ vertically. As you can see, the ‘bass’ driver’s response rolls off very steeply below 80Hz and extends out to 2kHz before being rolled off by the crossover network. The ‘midrange’ driver’s response is really only truly ‘flat’ between 270Hz and 350Hz, being rolled off both above and below these frequencies. The impedance modulus shown in Graph 5 is of the total system. It’s fairly unusual, as Equipment Reviews on Zinio S PS AUDIO’ O CD COMB TICKS ALL ES THE BOX $7.95 HF Mar12_001 Cover.indd 1 PM 1 4:17:26 6/03/2012 2:42:19 PM 19/12/201 d 1 _001 Cover.ind HF JanFeb12 Australian Hi-Fi Magazine's most recent equipment reviews are now available digitally, from Zinio, so you can buy an individual electronic copy of the magazine containing the review you want, for just $4.49. Each copy of the magazine you download will contain at least three additional reviews, plus a variety of feature articles and music reviews. The following recent equipment reviews are currently available via Zinio. • Aaron XX 20th Anniversary Integrated Amp • Atlantic Technology 334SB Subwoofer • Atlantic Technology 444SB Subwoofer TRANSMISSION LINE • Atohm GT 1.0 Loudspeakers Although the instruction manual that comes with the VR-35 says it is a ‘Triple Chamber Transmission Line’ enclosure, it appeared to me from what little I could determine from examining the exterior of the enclosure and the rear port that Von Schweikert’s concept of a transmission line enclosure is different to mine. Von Schweikert says a transmission line is ‘a non-resonant tuned box’, whereas my understanding of a transmission line enclosure is that the whole point is to slow down the sound waves issuing from the rear of the cone relative to their velocity in free air (i.e. the sound at the front of the cone) and that the primary reason for doing this is to shift the phase of the driver’s rear output by around 90° in order to reinforce frequencies near the driver’s Fs. It’s true that many manufacturers who use transmission line loading ‘stuff’ the line so full of absorbent material that there’s very little output from the line, which is why they’re often called ‘non-resonant’ but the essential idea, at least as proposed by the inventor of the transmission line, Dr A.R. Bailey, is that there is output at the end of the transmission line, and that it enhances only the low bass. When I emailed him to clarify this, Albert Von Schweikert emailed me back that the VR-35 was actually a ‘quasi’-transmission line. ‘You might not visually recognize our woofer cabinets as being a transmission line design, since we don’t use the labyrinth design, but […] the line tunnel (labyrinth) length is not as important as the stuffing density of the ‘fibrous tangle,’ which can be fibreglass, porous foam, long hair wool, or crimped Dacron,’ he wrote. ‘Our quasi-transmission line is non-resonant due to the 100 per cent stuffing density of crimped Dacron and has an impedance curve that shows the impedance peaks highly pushed down to nearly a flat line, which is indicative of a properly tuned transmission line. Our design behaves just like ‘labyrinth’ designs which use a long tunnel behind the woofer, although we do not use the labyrinth style since it requires a box size about twice the size of our cabinet. Our various models use several tuned chambers, each with a differing stuffing density, so that the woofer is tuned to a low frequency by the combined air masses of the various chambers.’ Despite Von Schweikert’s emailed clarification, I retain the view that in order to be called a ‘transmission line’ design—quasi or otherwise—a loudspeaker should incorporate a ‘folded line’ or ‘acoustic labyrinth’ at least 2.7-metres in length. gb • B&W 802 Diamond Loudspeakers HF May12_034 Test Von.indd 51 • Bel Canto C5i Integrated DAC/Amplifier • Berkeley Audio Design Alpha DAC • JBL Studio 130 Loudspeakers (Also Free Download from www.avhub.com.au) • JBL Sub 150P Subwoofer (Also Free Download from www.avhub.com.au) • Marantz PM-KI-Pearl-Lite Int Amplifier (Also Free Download from www.avhub.com.au) • Marantz SA KI Pearl Lite SACD Player • Moon Evolution 700i Integrated Amplifier • Oppo BDP-95 Blu-ray Universal Disc Player (Also Free Download from www.avhub.com.au) • Orpheus Apollo VI Loudspeakers • PS Audio Perfect Wave Transport & DAC • Move 2500 Portable DAB+ Radio • Technical Brain TBC-Zero/TBP-Zero Pre/Power Amplifiers • VAF Signature i90 Loudspeakers • Velodyne Digital Drive DD-15+ Subwoofer • Whatmough Signature P33i Loudspeakers To download any of these reviews, type www.tinyurl.com/ Equip-Reviews-1 into your browser, then click on the link to the review you want. (Zinio's electronic platform supports Android, Windows 7, WebOS, iOS, and Air.) 9/05/2012 12:29:04 PM