One can draw an unmistakable through-line from Richard Vandersteen’s 1977 garage-built experimental speaker to today’s flagship Model Seven XTRM reviewed here.
That garage project, which became the Vandersteen Audio Model Two, was an instant classic and went on to become the best-selling audiophile speaker of all time. While many speaker companies have come and gone in the past 47 years, and others have ventured in different technical directions, Vandersteen has stayed true to the principles that are the foundation of the Model Two’s phenomenal success.
One of those principles is the idea that a loudspeaker should be time and phase coherent. That is, the individual wavefronts produced by each driver should line up perfectly in time. When one driver moves forward, all the other drivers should move forward in perfect unison. Although one would intuitively think this factor is a prerequisite to fidelity, very few speakers are phase coherent. There’s a fundamental musical rightness of this approach that’s hard to identify with any specific sonic criteria, but I believe that it’s one reason the Model Two sold in such massive numbers; potential purchasers auditioning the Model Two in a dealer’s showroom responded to that musical rightness with their wallets. About a quarter of a million of them to be precise (that’s not a misprint).
The Model Seven XTRM is an evolution of the Model Seven introduced in 2009 and that I reviewed in 2010 (Issue 206). The fundamental architecture is the same: powered woofers, an external passive high-pass filter before your power amplifier, Vandersteen’s own patented carbon-fiber-and-balsa-wood drivers, extensive bass adjustments for better room integration, and time-and-phase coherence. You could look at the two speakers side-by-side and think that they are the same, but the Seven XTRM employs a host of technological improvements while remaining true to the product’s conception. It’s worth noting that a Model Seven of any vintage can be upgraded to the XTRM. A Seven upgraded at Vandersteen’s factory is identical in every way to new production (except, of course, cabinet wear-and-tear).
Before we get to what’s new in the XTRM, let’s review the Seven’s platform which is unlike that of any other speaker I’m aware of.
First, the basics. The Seven is a four-way floorstander with dual side-firing woofers driven by an internal 400W linear (not switching) amplifier, a 7″ mid/bass driver, 4.5″ midrange, and a 1″ dome tweeter. There’s a .75″ tweeter around back to reproduce ambience information. The sealed enclosure is faceted, with a narrower top section. A barrier strip provides bi-wire or bi-amplified connection. Sensitivity is on the low side at 85dB, but the powered woofer section reduces demands on your amplifier. The Seven can be ordered in any automotive color, with candy apple red and black being standard. It is priced at $89,300.
Although several manufacturers offer speakers featuring an integral power amplifier to drive the woofer, Vandersteen takes the idea several steps further by offering with the speaker a high-pass filter that fits between your preamplifier and power amplifier. Vandersteen sells this mandatory filter separately (starting at $3092) because some Model Seven customers may own Vandersteen’s High Pass Amplifiers which have an integral filter. The filter is a small passive box (called the M7-HP) that has an input jack and a captive output cable (you can order it with RCA or XLR connectors). The filter rolls off the bass at 6dB per octave with a corner frequency of 140Hz. A filter inside the Seven’s integral woofer amplifier has a reciprocal curve, restoring flat response. This technique is directly analogous to the RIAA equalization curves used on all LPs; bass is cut and treble boosted when the album is cut, and then an inverse filter in your phonostage boosts bass and cuts treble for flat response.
There are benefits to the Seven’s approach. First, your power amplifiers are relieved of the burden of amplifying low frequencies, leaving more power and dynamic headroom for the rest of the spectrum. In addition, building a power amplifier into the speaker confers all the benefits of bi-amping. Significantly, the signal driving the Seven’s woofer amplifier is taken from your power amplifier so that the entire spectrum shares the same sonic signature.
But perhaps more importantly, powered bass offers the opportunity to incorporate equalization that allows you to tune the speaker to your room. In the Seven, this takes the form of 11 trim pots (trimmer potentiometers, small screwdriver adjustments recessed in the rear panel). Used in conjunction with test tones (available on Vandersteen’s included CD or downloaded from the Vandersteen website), you can precisely reduce the amplitude of room modes and realize a much flatter bass response. Specifically, each of the 11 adjustments can boost or cut the signal at the specific test-tone frequencies: 20Hz, 24Hz, 30Hz, etc. up to 180Hz. In practice, you play the 11 test tones on the CD in sequence and note the sound-pressure level of each tone at the listening seat as measured by an SPL meter. Vandersteen supplies a handy sheet for filling in these values. Then you play the series of tones again, this time with someone behind the speaker with a small screwdriver. Consulting the chart of sound-pressure levels you just wrote down, instruct the person to raise or lower the level of each trim pot until the meter reads close to the reference level. You’ve just reduced the amplitude of room modes and smoothed the bass response. The process takes about 20 minutes, but I expect that your dealer will perform this calibration upon installation.
It’s important to note that it’s a mistake to overly boost frequencies where there’s a null; you are simply pumping more energy into what is essentially an energy sink, stressing the loudspeaker in the process. The best approach is to very lightly boost the dips but to be more aggressive in attenuating peaks, which are much more audible than nulls. This reality is reflected in the Seven’s adjustment range; the trim pots can provide up to 3dB of boost but as much as 20dB of cut. In practice, the idea is to knock down the highest peaks (but not all the way down) and very slightly bring up the nulls. It is important to leave some of the peaks; the ear/brain unconsciously creates a “map” of the listening room through those peaks and nulls from speaking and hearing other sounds in that room. Removing too much of that signature through equalization creates a cognitive dissonance that reduces the feeling of musical immersion, according to Vandersteen.
In addition to this granular calibration ability, you can also adjust the overall woofer volume as well as the woofer “Q”. The term “Q” refers to a unitless number that describes whether the woofer is overdamped (producing a tight and well-defined bass) or underdamped (producing a looser and fuller bottom end). Between correct loudspeaker placement, the 11-band bass equalizer, the woofer-level control, and the “Q” adjustment, it is possible to exert tremendous control over the sound of the bass in your room. Even my room, which was built from scratch with optimal dimensional ratios and elaborate wall construction (ASC Iso-Wall), greatly benefited from this adjustability. The benefits of this bass adjustability will be even greater in conventional living rooms.
The dual 11″ woofers are mounted on either side of the cabinet so that the energy they impart to the cabinet cancels, a technique Vandersteen calls “CounterForce Bass.” The woofers operate below 100Hz, handing off bass duties to a 7″ mid/bass driver. The midrange and treble are reproduced by a 4.5″ midrange driver and 1″ dome tweeter. A .75″ rear-firing tweeter reproduces ambient information. The new Seven’s design is built around these two 11″ woofers rather than a single downward-firing 12″ in the original Model Seven.
The mid/bass driver, midrange, and tweeter are all Vandersteen’s own patented design, with cones (or dome in the tweeter’s case) made from a sandwich of carbon-fiber skins over balsa wood. Vandersteen believes that it’s important that each driver is made from the same material because every material has its own unique signature. Employing the same material across all the drivers avoids a sonic discontinuity. The drivers, which Vandersteen calls “Perfect-Piston,” feature very stiff cones that reportedly have no breakup modes until very far above their passbands (the frequency range over which they are operated).
Vandersteen was motivated to develop drivers that would remain pistonic outside their passbands because of the company’s fundamental commitment to time-and-phase coherent behavior, which requires first-order crossovers. Let’s unpack that sentence and explain the relationship between driver stiffness, crossover topology, and time-and-phase coherent behavior.
We’ll start by explaining what “pistonic” means in a driver. A loudspeaker cone will operate as a piston (that is, all parts of the cone move together) up to a certain frequency, above which it starts to flex; some parts of the cone are moving forward while other parts are moving backward. This is called “breakup.” All drivers experience breakup—the stiffer the cone the higher the breakup frequency. When a driver goes into breakup, distortion instantly skyrockets, as you can imagine. Vandersteen has created an outstanding six-minute YouTube video explaining breakup and showing an animated measurement taken of actual drivers that graphically demonstrates the phenomenon.
The second part of understanding Vandersteen’s quest for stiffer cones and their concomitant higher breakup frequencies goes back to the company’s fundamental requirement that their speakers be time-and-phase coherent (all the drivers move in perfect unison). The only crossover topology that is time-and-phase coherent is the first order, which has the slowest and most gentle roll-off of all crossover types. A first-order crossover has a slope of 6dB per octave. That means that one octave above the crossover frequency, the signal amplitude is attenuated by only 6dB. For example, in the Seven the mid/bass driver crosses over to the midrange at 600Hz. At 1200 Hz, one octave above the crossover frequency, the mid/bass driver is receiving and reproducing 1200Hz but attenuated by 6dB. Another octave above that, 2400Hz, the mid/bass driver receives and reproduces 2400Hz that is attenuated by another 6dB, and so forth.
A challenge for designers of speakers with first-order crossovers is that a midrange driver crossed over to the tweeter at, say, 2kHz will still be receiving a significant amount of energy at 4kHz. If that driver goes into breakup at, say, 3.7kHz, you’ll hear that breakup as distortion.
This is one reason why most speaker designers use crossovers with steeper slopes. A second-order crossover has a slope twice as steep as a first-order crossover, 12dB per octave. A fourth-order crossover is even steeper, with a roll-off of 24dB per octave. With steeper slopes, it’s easier to prevent the drivers from receiving energy that could drive them into breakup (provided that the drivers and crossover are well-engineered to begin with).
But such speakers can’t be time-and-phase coherent because the crossover complexity rotates the phase of the signal, forcing the designer to connect some of the drivers in opposite polarity. The various drivers no longer move forward in unison in response to an impulse; some are moving backward while others are moving forward. These designers sacrifice time-and-phase coherence for the advantages of crossovers with steeper slopes.
Speaker designers prefer steep crossover slopes for two other reasons. The first is that the power handling capability of the individual drivers is increased because the drivers are not receiving much energy below their passbands. For example, a midrange driver crossed over to the woofer at 200Hz with a first-order crossover is still reproducing 100Hz at a fairly high level (specifically, 6dB lower in level). This puts added stress on the drivers and limits their ability to play loudly without strain. With a fourth-order crossover, the energy at 100Hz reaching the driver is attenuated by a whopping 24dB—a huge difference. The second compelling reason to use steeper slopes is that the precise alignment of the drivers with respect to the listener is less crucial. In a time-and-phase coherent speaker, the speaker’s rake angle (its backward tilt) is critical to realizing the speaker’s performance potential. Rake angle will vary with the listening distance and listening height and must be calibrated in the listening room.
Vandersteen has overcome these challenges in one stroke with the Perfect-Piston drivers, along with a rake-angle adjustment system that delivers perfectly precise rake angle and thus driver alignment at the listening position.
The Perfect-Piston drivers have a much higher breakup frequency than other cone materials and construction, and when they do go into breakup, the amplitude of the breakup is a fraction of that of other driver types. This allows Vandersteen to use first-order crossovers without the drawbacks of shallower slopes. Most driver diaphragms with a “sandwich” construction employ thin carbon-fiber skins on either side of a lightweight foam such as Rohacell. Vandersteen’s innovation is to use balsa wood as the core. Balsa wood is still lightweight, but much stiffer than foam. The balsa wood’s stiffness, along with the sandwich structure (a “beam section” in engineering parlance), results in a cone with a much higher breakup frequency. The penalty, I suspect, is that the balsa cones are heavier than those that use a foam core, a speculation suggested by the Seven’s lowish sensitivity of 85dB. (That’s 85dB measured with 2.83V across 4 ohms; if measured with 1W input the sensitivity would be 82dB). It took Richard Vandersteen 10 years to perfect the carbon-fiber-balsa driver, for which he was awarded a patent.
The second innovation is a simple yet ingenious alignment method that provides perfect and easily repeatable phase coherence at the listening position. Here’s how it works. You remove the grilles and insert into the grille-mounting holes a special jig to which a laser is mounted. You measure the listener’s ear height and put a piece of tape on the seat at the listening height. Then, using the Seven’s rear spike height adjustments, tilt the speaker forward or backward so that the laser strikes the mark on the tape. This process is repeated with the other speaker. A side benefit is that this laser alignment assures identical toe-in for each speaker. You can see this process in the YouTube video with Richard Vandersteen in my listening room that I reference later in this review.
Between the Perfect-Piston drivers and the laser alignment scheme, you can have your cake and eat it, too—no worry about audible cone breakup, along with perfect coherence at the listening seat no matter what the listening distance or listening height.
The Seven’s enclosure is a box-within-a-box, made from a layer of carbon fiber, a layer of HDF (high-density fiberboard), a viscous membrane, another layer of HDF, and then the carbon-fiber outer layer that is finished in an automotive paint. The enclosure was kept small intentionally; it’s easier to keep a smaller enclosure quiet, and the smaller panels have a higher resonant frequency that is more easily turned into heat by the viscous membrane. Internal bracing further damps the cabinet.
An innovation that distinguishes the XTRM version of the Model Seven is the addition of the Bedrock base, a 100-pound slab of granite about 3″ tall with dimensions that precisely match the speaker’s footprint. The Seven is bolted to the Bedrock, adding 100 pounds of mass to the cabinet bottom. Vandersteen found that although the enclosure panels were resonance free, the sheer dynamic forces generated by two powerful 11″ woofers could put the entire enclosure into motion. The Bedrock anchors the Seven to the floor, eliminating any possibility of cabinet movement. The Bedrock also damps resonances of the bottom panel, which isn’t braced into the cabinet’s structure because it must be removable to perform upgrades.
Overall, the Model Seven’s look and operation are quite different from most other loudspeakers. It is considerably smaller than many speakers approaching $100k, which has its own virtues and verities. It would be a mistake, however, to look at the Seven’s relatively modest cabinet size and form an opinion of its bass capabilities before listening.
Listening
Richard Vandersteen and Brad O’Toole, Vandersteen Audio’s Sales and Marketing Specialist, visited to set up the Model Seven XTRM. You can see a video of Richard in my listening room explaining the technology behind the Model Seven on The Absolute Sound’s YouTube channel.
As mentioned, the Seven is set up for bi-wiring, with two pairs of inputs (on a barrier strip rather than binding posts). If you connect the Seven with bi-wire cable or use jumpers between the terminals with a single-wire connection, the system will be bi-amplified because of the Seven’s integral amplifier. It is possible, however, to tri-amplify the Seven with two stereo amplifiers, which is how we set up the Sevens for review. The CH Precision M10 power amplifiers have enormous adaptability to different setups. They can operate as a mono amplifier, stereo amplifier, passive bi-amping, active bi-amping, or in bridged monoblock mode. Moreover, their ability to adjust the feedback in 1% increments from the listening seat makes the M10 a reviewer’s dream (not to mention its state-of-the-art sound quality).
Even before the speakers settled in, it was immediately apparent that the Model Seven XTRM had a relaxed ease and warmth that fostered musical engagement. This isn’t a “look-at-me” speaker that brings detail to the fore and impresses the uninitiated in a quick demo. Rather, the XTRM’s sound invites you to sit down, sink into the listening chair, and put on some old favorites.
I’ll return to this quality throughout the review, but first I want to tell you about the XTRM’s extraordinary bass. This is the performance aspect most unlike that of other speakers because of the Seven’s extensive adjustability.
I’ve often found that there are two factors that discourage one from turning up the volume to a satisfying level. The first is a hardness and glare in the upper midrange and treble; saxophone has a glassy sheen, vocal sibilance is intrusive, and cymbals sound metallic, to name a few. We’ve all experienced that “cringe” moment when a loud instrument or an orchestral climax snaps us out of musical immersion. These artifacts are exacerbated with volume.
The second limiting factor in how loudly you can play an audio system is often bass bloat and boominess. The higher you turn up the volume, the harder you drive your room’s acoustic resonance modes and the more audible they become. A constant midbass drone is terribly distracting and a non-starter for me.
The Vandersteen Model Seven XTRM overcomes these two limitations, first with its beautiful timbral smoothness through the mids and treble, and second with its ability to dial out the worst of the room’s bass resonance modes and set the bass level and “Q” precisely to your room. The result is a kind of physical immersion in the music and sound by virtue of the full-bodied visceral bottom end that eludes many other speakers in real-world rooms. You can keep turning up the volume without hearing the room start to howl back at you.
The ability to fine-tune the bass response to a room pays other dividends. Reducing midbass bloat has the interesting effect of making the midrange sound more open and transparent, with greater clarity and resolution. It’s as though the musical details in the mids that we want to hear are unmasked by removing midbass thickness. Indeed, resolution of real musical detail through the midrange is one of the XTRM’s great achievements; this speaker has the ability to sound relaxed and laid back yet simultaneously filled with finely filigreed inner detail—detail that carries real musical meaning and that contributes to a sense of the system disappearing and leaving only the music.
Reducing bass bloat has the same effect at the other end of that frequency range—in the low bass. Getting rid of midbass smear allows the lowermost octaves to be reproduced with greater clarity, texture, dynamic shading, and weight. The other night I was listening to the outstanding straight-ahead all-acoustic jazz album Originals by the sadly underappreciated saxman Gary Meek when all these qualities that I’d been thinking about were made manifest. The great Brian Bromberg’s acoustic bass solo on the track “Pacific Grove Fog” illustrates what makes the XTRM’s bass so great. Bromberg explores the instrument’s full register, and as he traverses the frequency spectrum the instrument sounds completely coherent, continuous, and “of a piece” from top to bottom. The instrument’s sound was clean and free from variations in amplitude, timbre, and attack or decay, no matter the register. Plus, the weight of the bass was powerfully present in my room with an enormously satisfying physicality. The articulation of each note, coupled with the warm textural density, beautifully conveyed the instrument’s sound and his virtuosity. It helps that the XTRM also goes very low in the bass (it’s rated at 2dB down at 22Hz). You can hear this prodigious bass extension on Rutter’s Requiem on Reference Recordings, a title I’ve used in just about every review I’ve written since it came out 30 years ago. On the track “Pie Jesu,” the organ pedal tones have a solidity and power that many other speakers merely hint at. If you dare, play the opening track of Blade Runner 2049, which has the lowest bass I’ve ever heard on a commercial recording. Midway through the track, a bass note gradually descends from low, to subterranean, and then slips below audibility. I felt the room being pressurized without hearing the tone, indicating that the Model Seven’s bass extends below audibility.
Although the XTRM has 400W of on-board power to drive the woofers, the speaker still needs a powerful amplifier to realize its potential; the power meters on the CH Precision M10 amplifiers indicated 350+ watts of output during loud passages.
Going back to the XTRM’s rendering of timbre, the sound had an organic wholeness that had the enormously satisfying combination of textural warmth with resolution. String tone lacked the silvery sheen one so often hears; rather, it possessed more than a hint of that gossamer-like delicacy you experience in the concert hall. Listen to Hillary Hahn’s instrument on the Deutsche Grammophon double LP Retrospective, one disc of which was recorded direct-to-disc. It is utterly liquid and delicious, without grain, edge, or artifice. Or listen to the new recording of Scheherazade performed by Britain’s National Symphony Orchestra on Chasing The Dragon. This spectacular (musically and sonically) half-speed-mastered LP showcases everything that’s so right about the Seven; the great delicacy of the solo violin passages, the speaker’s ability to delineate separate musical lines, and the richly textured and full-bodied bass section. Piano was also particularly well reproduced by the XTRM; the speaker conveyed a feeling of the instrument’s size, warmth, body, and tonal richness while also avoiding the common affliction of a glassy or “shattering” character in fortissimo passages played in the upper register. I appreciated this quality as much on Chick Corea’s instrument in his all-acoustic album Friends as I did on the famous Nojima Plays Liszt. As you’d expect from this description, the XTRM’s reproduction of the human voice was realistic, warm, and inviting. I had the XTRM for review just as I discovered Joni Mitchell’s newly released Archives, Vol.3, a collection of previously unreleased demos, early alternate takes, and live performances from 1972–1975. The Vandersteens beautifully reproduced the timbre and texture of Joni’s bell-like soprano as well as all the subtleties of her inflections, making me happy to have discovered this album through the Vandersteens.
The Seven’s ability to sound at once smooth and relaxed yet richly detailed is a rare quality; most speakers lean one way or the other, the so-called “romantic” vs. “analytical” dichotomy. Vandersteen speakers have a reputation for falling on the romantic side of that line, and I would agree with that generalization. But the Seven’s great achievement is that this smoothness and ease don’t come at the expense of detail. You don’t appreciate the Vandersteen’s resolution by listening for it or pointing to it. Rather, it sneaks up on you in the listening session when you recognize a previously unheard musical gesture, a newfound contribution by a player in the back of the mix, the realistic inner detail of an instrument or voice, and other musically communicative aspects of the sound that make listening to music involving. The XTRM delivers real musical resolution rather than sonic fireworks. I could easily hear the contributions of very low-level instruments in the presence of louder ones, along with the ability to shift my focus from one player to another. For example, on the album Like Minds with Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, and Roy Haynes, Chick, as usual, provides harmonically fascinating comping during the other players’ solos. His contribution is musically vivid without being forward sonically, and I could shift my attention between him and the soloist. His piano was distinct as a separate entity rather than becoming lost in the musical fabric, heightening the feeling of contemporaneous music-making.
How many times have you listened to “Tin Pan Alley” from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Couldn’t Stand the Weather? I thought so. Although I’ve heard this track countless times, listening to it through the XTRM made me aware of something I hadn’t noticed before: The ride cymbal has rivets. Riveted ride cymbals provide a shimmer composed of densely spaced high-frequency transients that decay. The XTRM resolved this incredibly fine treble microstructure in a way that made clear how the sound was produced. It wasn’t a burst of high-frequency energy, but a delicately resolved aspect of the instrument that unconsciously makes you more vividly imagine the drummer and the drum kit and thus experience greater musical realism. I’m sure that I’ve heard this before but have never been consciously aware of it. This is the kind of resolution the Model Seven XTRM brings to life, not hyped transients or fatiguing edge.
Conclusion
The Vandersteen Audio Model Seven XTRM is technically innovative, reflecting original thinking rather than following a “me-to” cones-in-a-box approach. It is the culmination of 47 years of continuous development that can trace its fundamental design principles to Vandersteen’s Model Two from 1977.
The powered bass, with its extensive room-specific calibration ability, gives the Seven XTRM a huge advantage in realizing its performance potential across a wide range of listening rooms. The technique allows the speaker to deliver a wonderfully powerful and visceral musical foundation without the usual bass bloat and thickness. The in-house-designed carbon-fiber-and-balsa driver array produces a harmonic beauty and gorgeous tonal realism that define the Seven’s overall character of warmth and textural density without the sacrifice of resolution.
If I had to sum up the Model Seven XTRM with one word, it would be “involving.” The sheer timbral beauty, fabulously muscular bass with no bloat or boom, and treble detail without brightness, all add up to a speaker that makes you want to continue the listening sessions long into the night. A measure of a product’s quality is how quickly and easily you slip into that feeling of musical immersion that is the raison d’être of high-end audio. I had that experience repeatedly with the Model Seven XTRM, spending many evenings playing album after album. It has the wonderful ability to communicate musical expression in a way that doesn’t sound like listening to “hi-fi.” The Vandersteen Audio Model Seven XTRM is a speaker for music lovers, and one that I could happily live with for the rest of my life.
Specs & Pricing
Type: Four-way dynamic loudspeaker with powered woofer
Driver complement: 2x 11″ aluminum-cone woofers, 7″ mid/woofer, 4.5″ midrange, 1″ tweeter, .75″ rear-firing tweeter
Integral amplifier power: 400W linear amplifier with power-factor corrected power supply
Frequency response: 22Hz–50kHz ±2dB
Impedance: 4 ohms
Sensitivity: 85dB (2.83V)
Crossover frequencies: 100Hz, 600Hz, 5kHz, first-order slopes (6dB/octave)
Dimensions: 14″ x 42.5″ x 20″ (Bedrock base adds 3″ to height, spikes add 1.5″ to height)
Weight: 185 lbs. each (285 lbs. with Bedrock base)
Finishes: Candy Apple Red, Diamond Black standard; any automotive finish upon request
Price: $89,300 (plus $3092 for HP-7 filter)
VANDERSTEEN AUDIO
116 West Fourth St.
Hanford, CA 93230
USA
(559) 582-0324
vandersteen.com
Associated Equipment
Analog source: Basis Audio A.J. Conti Transcendence turntable with SuperArm 12.5 tonearm; Air Tight Opus cartridge; Moon 810LP phonostage; DS Audio ST-50 stylus cleaner, Levin record brush, Degritter ultrasonic LP cleaner
Digital source: Wadax Reference DAC with Reference DC Cables, Wadax Reference Server with Reference PSU, Wadax Akasa digital interface, UpTone Audio EtherREGEN Ethernet switch
Amplification: CH Precision L10 Dual Monaural linestage; CH Precision M10 Dual Monaural power amplifiers
AC Power: Shunyata Everest 8000 conditioner, Shunyata Omega and Sigma NR V2 power cords; Shunyata AC outlets, five dedicated 20A lines wired with identical length 10AWG; two Göbel AC power cords (powering the subwoofers)
Support: Critical Mass Systems Olympus equipment racks and Olympus amplifier stands; Center Stage2 isolation, Arya Audio RevOpods isolation, Wilson Audio Pedestal isolation
Cables: AudioQuest Dragon interconnects, AudioQuest Dragon Zero and Dragon Bass loudspeaker cables
Grounding: Shunyata Altaira grounding system
Accessories: The Chord Company GroundArray noise reduction
Acoustics: Acoustic Geometry Pro Room Pack 12, ASC 16″ Round Tube Traps
Room: Purpose-built; Acoustic Sciences Corporation Iso-Wall System
