Did you see our ad in this recent video?
Hey, it’s Jay here. We here at the Vanatoo Haters Association focus on all of the things wrong with the Vanatoo line of products. When I say we, I mean me, but I expect the organization to grow to maybe two to three members within the next five years. The world loves Vanatoo’s products, but not us here at the VHA.
Here are the things I hate, ahem, I mean we hate, about the Vanatoo Transparent One Encore powered bookshelf speakers. Play ball!
Strike 1
I was expecting this speaker to play down to 20hz so I could use it without a sub in my theater room. They should fix that on the Transparent Twos without changing the enclosure size or woofer size.
Strike 2
These don’t have a built-in ultra short throw projector. They should include that on every bookshelf speaker.
Foul Ball
Rick and Gary, the owners of Vanatoo are nice guys. Who do they think they are being all helpful and stuff. I have no idea what the word Vanatoo means, but I bet it’s something pleasant. Pssh.
Strike 3
These guys are putting out good products at affordable prices. I expect HiFi companies to create products at extremely high price points. That way, I can look at the speakers from a distance and bring my audiophile friends so we can admire the price tags. You can’t do that with a $599 pair of speakers. Affordable. Yuck!
Strike 4
These sound extremely good especially nearfield. This makes my more expensive speakers look bad.
Thrown out of the Game
These do so much, it renders a lot of my gear useless. What will I do with this power amp, preamp, and DAC now? It’s all built-in to the T1e’s. And to make things worse, they use a proprietary cable for the speaker connections and the power cable can’t be detached. What am I supposed to do with these $10,000 power cable and similarly priced speaker cables?
What are the things you hate about your Vanatoo speakers?
Jay
President of the VHA
#justkidding Here’s my real review of the Vanatoo Transparent One Encore powered bookshelf speakers.
[…] Vanatoo Haters Association […]
Sorry Jay, I looove mine!!! 🙂 🙂
A while ago I came across this website (https // w w w .npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality) and decided to see if I could tell the difference between 128kbps, 320kbps and FLAC music. Playing the clips from the website through my analog connected M-Audio AV 40 (the original and the best AV 40) speakers, I could not tell the difference and I knew this was probably a case of some inferior part of the chain between the music and the final output. I downsampled a FLAC file into both 320kbps and 128kbps and in Audacity it was clear by looking at the waveform onscreen that the audio was different. Playing these from the computer, via Audacity, over the AV 40s, still sounded the same. Then my Vanatoo T1Es arrived at the beginning of March. I connected them to a Samsung Q80R TV and played those same clips over Wifi, through the TV, audio out via an optical cable to the Vanatoo T1Es. Wow!! Finally I could easily tell the difference. The 128kbps was mehh, the 320kbps was obviously better, but the FLAC was gorgeous. I played Leonard Cohen’s Way Down Deep sung by Jennifer Warnes and my mouth dropped because I had never heard how amazing that song could be. So I played it again and again and again. I now need to redo the NPR test, but I need to get T1Es on the computer before doing this.
Note: I am not a shill for Vanatoo. I bought the set myself as a preorder, sound unheard, based on reviews of the now-discontinued T1. I then crossed my fingers for months waiting for them to come in, hoping they would sound as good as the old T1 reviews promised. It was worth the wait.