John Atkinson - Vandersteen Quatro Wood CT & M5-HPA

LOUDSPEAKER & MONOBLOCK POWER AMPLIFIER

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"Stirring the stew” is what I’ve heard it called when a company introduces a new version of a product every three or four years. When a new product is launched, sales generally rise rapidly to a maximum and then slowly decline. If the stew is stirred every few years, plotting the product’s sales volume against time results in a sawtooth wave, without sales ever dropping close to zero.

Richard Vandersteen doesn’t appear to believe in stews or stirring. Vandersteen loudspeakers stay on the market for a long time, with infrequent updates. Consider the Vandersteen Quatro loudspeaker. The original version was reviewed for Stereophile by Michael Fremer in July 20061 and cost $6995/pair, with the necessary line-level high-pass filters priced at $595/pair for unbalanced operation and $795/pair for balanced. As retailers felt the plain-Jane sock that covered the loudspeaker might be an impediment to sales, Richard introduced not a new version of the Quatro with a wooden veneer finish but a different loudspeaker, the Quatro Wood, which cost $10,700/pair without the filters and which the late Wes Phillips reviewed in December 2007.2

Twelve years later, there is a new version of the Quatro Wood, the Quatro Wood CT, which costs $15,499/pair in standard finish. Balanced line-level filters now cost $1295/ pair but are not necessary if the Quatro Wood CT is used with one of Vandersteen’s high-pass monoblock amplifiers, the hybrid M7-HPA ($59,999/pair), which I reviewed in May 2016,3 or the new solid-state M5-HPA ($15,800/pair), which I am reviewing here with the Quatro Wood CT.

The Quatro Wood CT