Hi Seth, how do you like the Vandersteens?
I just missed an opportunity to buy a pair I saw at a pawn shop. The grill cloth looked like a cat got at them, and the cabinets looked a little beat up.
They wanted under $300. I went back a few days later and the had a 'Sold' sticker on them.
These 2Ce towers do sound extremely good, they are kind of difficult to place because of how the low frequency driver interacts with the room. The 2Ce is a true 4 way loudspeaker with a tweeter, midrange, woofer, and low frequency driver. They definitely cover a wide range of freqencies and sound brilliant at it when placed halfway decently (I won't say correctly, because I'm not certain they are set up correctly).
They aren't very efficient, which isn't the best thing for me since I intend to drive them with the Teac, but they still sound pretty good even at reasonable output. The AR Classic 18 towers I have are a bit more efficient, though they are apparently a harder to drive speaker because of the load they bare. The 2Ce towers are stated to be 7 ohms nominal 4 ohms minimum. The AR Classic 18s are 4 ohms nominal but have a few dB gain in sensitivity giving them a slight edge in output given the same attenuation on the Teac.
The ARs are a bit bolder sounding and sound more correct in the bass (probably because of the size of my room honestly. The 2Ce towers probably need a bigger room than mine to sound correct, or some pretty advanced acoustic treatment that I'm not willing to drop the coin for at the moment.
Vandersteen's design for their 2Ce model is first rate though, I'm not sure if you have ever seen what they look like without the shroud.
As you can see from that picture the front baffle is broken up into 3 parts, each of which signifies a completely separate enclosure for the tweeter and midrange drivers, the woofer and low freqency driver are enclosed inside the same box, but the low frequency driver is located on the rear of the speaker.
All I can say is that at retail the Vandersteen 2Ce is a formidable speaker system that I wouldn't dare shake another speaker that costs the same at. It's almost embarrasing to look at the prices of some other gear that doesn't come close to approaching this level of design and craftsmanship. I have a pair of Boston Acoustics VR-M60 bookshelf speakers that retailed for $2000 a pair when they where anounced. The street prices for those wheren't nearly that high once they where out for a while, but it's insane to think that a speaker like the Vandersteen could have cost the same or less than a measely bookshelf speaker with performance that is pale in comparison to the Vandersteen 2Ce. You want to talk about mopping the floor, I dare any out of the box production speaker to compete with the linear performance of the Vandersteen 2Ce in the same price range, as far as I know it simply doesn't exist. The only place one might find comparable or higher performance is in the pro studio world, but that's a different ball game.
There's a good reason why Vandersteen has been producing this model for such a long time, because they did excellent R&D and implemented it to produce one of the longest production runs of a speaker speaker in history with minimal alterations to the design or parts, because they did it right. The reason the speaker is so affordable is because of the long work they put in a long time ago to insure this model would continue to be produced with the same fundamental design for a long time. Look at Vandersteen's more recent offerings, they are vastly expensive compared to the 2Ce. I'm not saying they aren't better, but I do believe the performance per dollar spent lies with the 2Ce.
In regards to a damaged sock (shroud) you can get it replaced, and the wood surfaces are so minimal if they where damaged it would be inexpensive to replace or have refinished. It's as if Vandersteen thought of everything when designing these speakers.
One more picture with a goofy looking guy.
