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Von Schweikert Audio Endeavor E-5 Loudspeaker

Von Schweikert Audio Endeavor E-5 Loudspeaker

In the 1986 film Ruthless People, Judge Reinhold plays Ken, who works as a salesman in an audio store, the kind with boxes of cheap receivers stacked on the floor. In walks a gum-smacking heavy metal enthusiast, maybe 19, who is looking for speakers. Ken senses an easy mark and his presentation is pitch-perfect. “You know, when it comes to great stereo, you can’t beat big speakers. I’m talking about big speakers with big woofers.”

After quickly walking him past the models with eight, ten, and twelve-inch bass drivers, Ken steers the wide-eyed kid into the store’s inner sanctum where there stands an enormous, hideously ugly box with flashing lights and the biggest woofer cone you’ve ever seen: “Check it out, my man! The flagship of the entire Dominator line, the MX-10—thirty inches of thigh-slapping, blood-pumping nuclear brain damage! So what if it’s as big as a Subaru and costs as much? You’ll never have to trade this in; this is going to be with you for the rest of your life. And when you die, they can bury you in it!”

Comedic hyperbole, of course, but who among us at some point in our audiophile journey hasn’t imagined owning large loudspeakers that can begin to suggest the scale and dynamics of live music? There are three principal barriers to purchasing big speakers, however. In increasing order of importance they are: appearance, cost, and—perhaps most critically—the requirement for a large space to put them in, the kind of domestic environment most of us don’t have. You just can’t put a large speaker in a modest-sized room, right? I’m here to tell you that maybe you can.

Von Schweikert Audio Endeavor E-5 Loudspeaker

Leif Swanson is a musician (a guitarist) who developed a strong interest in the design and manufacture of sound reinforcement systems. By the mid-2000s, Swanson owned a CNC shop in Riverside, California, and was building big PA enclosures for pro sound companies. It was during this period that Swanson was approached to construct cabinets for Von Schweikert Audio, which also happens to be located in Riverside [see sidebar]. Over the course of a decade, Albert Von Schweikert schooled Swanson in numerous aspects of mechanical and electrical theory. Along with Albert and his son Damon, Swanson participated in the design of every VSA product for more than eight years. Swanson started his own loudspeaker company, Endeavor Audio, and the elder Von Schweikert was impressed with his work. In September of 2015, VSA acquired Endeavor Audio and all of its designs: the two current EA models, the E-3 MkII and the E-5 are now their own “line” within the Von Schweikert range. Going forward, those speakers will wear the VSA badge.

The $35,000 Endeavor E-5 is a big speaker but it’s really more accurate to characterize it as a tall speaker. The cabinet is 66″ vertically and the aluminum plinth it rests on plus the carpet-piercing spikes add another 2″ to the total height. However, the front baffle is just 9″ wide, tapering to 5″ at the rear, and the speaker is only 15″ deep. With the seven drivers per side exposed, the E-5 will not disappear into any décor outside of an audio store (though with their black cloth grilles in place, they are less obtrusive). Standard finishes are high-gloss black or metallic silver and other colors are available as options.

The E-5’s driver complement includes, at the vertical center of the loudspeaker, a 1″ beryllium tweeter and a pair of 6.5″ Kevlar midrange cones in a D’Appolito configuration. The tweeter is the same one used in the VSA VR-55, a modified ScanSpeak model that permits Swanson to utilize the driver’s full upper-range frequency response. Employing this device, he feels, results in less listener fatigue than with other metallic tweeters. Above and below the midrange/tweeter/midrange transducers are pairs of anodized aluminum woofers that are 7″ in diameter. The woofers (and midrange drivers) all sport a phase plug that, in addition to making phase behavior consistent throughout the cone’s diameter, also aides in efficient heat dissipation which, in turn, is responsible for the high power-handling capability of these relatively diminutive drivers.

For the enclosure, Leif Swanson’s goal was to identify “a single composite material that cut and bonded easily, but would have no audible panel resonance.” He came across a composite used in the construction industry that was tweaked for his application. The material is a cellular matrix composed of long fibrous tubes filled with a viscous resin, Swanson explained to me, that’s “inherently self-damped. A honeycomb structure is evident when a cross-section is viewed under a microscope and it’s rigid enough to be used as a cabinet wall, but will not ring.” Complementing the physical properties of the enclosure material, the E-5 employs VSA’s proprietary “Triple Wall” technology—artificial stone is bonded with an absorptive material to the inner surface of the cabinet. The three layers of the enclosure therefore have different resonant frequencies, which makes the box even more inert. The cellular matrix material is also used internally to form chambers for the midrange drivers that are sealed off from the spaces the woofers inhabit. What appear to be two ports on the rear of the speaker, near the top and bottom of the cabinet, are actually aperiodic vents, a decades-old Dynaudio invention that relieves pressure on the woofers and facilitates the fastest possible motion of those drivers. “To my thinking,” says Swanson, “we have achieved the best of both worlds—the low coloration of a sealed system combined with the higher dynamic range of a ported system.”

 

The crossovers’ circuit boards are built in-house and are hand-wired with Teflon-coated single-crystal copper. The design employs Linkwitz-Riley filters; there are eight versions of this filter and Swanson arduously tried each one with the E-5’s drivers to decide which was best. A single pair of robust binding posts that will accept spades or banana plugs is located near the bottom of the speaker.

The E-5s arrived in two substantial wooden crates. Though it definitely takes at least two people to get each speaker out of its box, setup is otherwise straightforward. Once uncrated, the E-5 is turned upside down so that its plinth can be bolted on, and then righted. After the final position (or something close to it) has been settled on, the four top-adjusting spikes are easily installed by tilting the speaker slightly—another two-person operation. Anticipating that the E-5s will need to lean back somewhat to assure that the tweeters are aimed at the primary listener’s ears, the rear two spikes are shorter than the front pair. My room is 15′ x 15′ with a 10′-to-12′ ceiling height—with every speaker review, I remind the reader that there is a hallway leading off one sidewall near the front of the room and standing waves haven’t been an issue with any of the numerous loudspeakers I’ve tried in the space—the E-5s ended up 8′ 6″ apart (center-to-center) and canted in towards the listening position. At their closest, the speakers were 18″ from the shelves behind them and the distance from the front baffle to the sweet spot was about 10′. Mostly, amplification was provided by David Berning Quadrature Z monoblocks, though the lower-powered Pass Labs XA60.8s saw some service as well. I used my usual Anthem D2v processor and also T+A’s DAC 8 DSD, the baby brother of the PDP 3000 HV that Robert Harley reviewed in Issue 268. Digital sources were an Oppo 93, used as a transport, and the Baetis Reference 2 computer.

Hearing music through the VSA Endeavor E-5 is like sitting down in front of a 110″ video screen for the first time. If you are someone who goes for Row D seats at orchestra concerts or fights his way forward to stand in front of the stage at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, this loudspeaker deserves your closest consideration. Their presentation is vivid, bold, excitingly realistic, and highly involving. There’s no point in using them for background music; with these speakers, you’re all in.

Naturally, large-scale music of all stripes—late Romantic and twentieth-century orchestral repertoire, balls-to-the-wall rock, the most exuberant big band recordings—would be expected to thrive via the E-5s, and I wasn’t disappointed. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 begins with eight French horns playing fortissimo, in unison, a mighty and heroic theme (in the score, it’s marked entschieden, or “resolute”) and the sense of restrained power, that these eight musicians were part of a much larger orchestral organism, was palpable—an impression amply confirmed over the next 107 minutes with Michael Tilson Thomas’s performance with the San Francisco Symphony. Likewise, the impact of Gordon Goodwin’s highly virtuosic Big Phat Band, executing their leader’s challenging arrangements on Act Your Age was more than just suggestive of the actual experience of hearing five saxes, four trumpets, four trombones, and an amplified rhythm section playing full-out. And, when there were no witnesses around, I put on Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” and was instantly transported back to a sweatier, more hormonally driven time in my life.

Swanson doesn’t view the Endeavor E-5s as a difficult amplifier load, and recommends 50Wpc as a satisfactory minimum. However, he does allow that since there are seven drivers per side to set in motion, “you will need some current to push the drivers at loud volume levels.” Indeed, I found that while the sound was quite impressive with the 60Wpc Pass XA60.8 amplifiers, the speakers performed at their best with the sort of program material noted above when the 200Wpc David Berning amps provided the necessary muscle for playback at enthusiastic levels.

Of course, scaling that’s exaggerated isn’t a desirable thing—who wants giant flutes and violins, or pianos that are ten feet wide?—and here I learned a valuable lesson. I picked out several recordings of much more modest musical forces—a string quartet (the Hagan Quartet playing the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 3) and Joni Mitchell’s classic album Blue, for which the singer accompanies herself on only guitar or piano for several selections. Initially, I did hear some bloating of the vocal and/or instrumental images. The quartet was standing up playing enlarged violins, viola, and cello; Mitchell’s voice and guitar on “Little Green” were plus-size. Then, an astute audiophile friend, over for a listen, pointed at the 58″ video monitor mounted high on the wall behind the speakers, positioned from 62″ to 97″ above the floor. I got a stepladder and draped a small blanket over the screen and, voilà; the image height and size anomalies were eliminated. I’d not had speakers nearly this tall in my room previously and, evidently, a highly reflective surface behind them made a difference that had not been apparent with shorter speakers.

The E-5’s bass is exceptionally articulate, fast, and tight. Swanson isn’t the first designer to recognize the advantage of having many smaller, widely spaced low-frequency drivers. (The ultimate expression may be the Audio Kinesis Swarm subwoofer system—see REG’s review in Issue 252.) Having four 7″ woofers, two high up and two near the floor on each tower, contributes to very smooth bass response, even in a relatively small space. As always, I performed DSP room-correction measurements, utilizing the Anthem’s ARC software, and based on the resulting room response curves, correction was needed only up to 300Hz, the least I’ve required with any loudspeaker to date. Having an enclosure that behaves largely like a sealed box also facilitates ideal positioning of the speakers for even bass response, as well as the best possible soundstaging and imaging. The E-5s do not create bass that isn’t there on the mastertape. Many favorite rock albums from the 1970s and 80s lack true deep bass—I’m thinking of some Genesis recordings, say “No Reply at All” from Abacab, where much of the electric bass part is played on the instrument’s upper strings—with the Endeavors, that musical element is lithe and tuneful. On the other hand, the bass drum pulse that continues throughout “Udu Chant” (as heard on the superbly recorded DVD-A The Best of Mickey Hart) has middle-of-the-earth extension yet still maintains definition and clarity. Unless the E-5s are used in a home theater setting and fighter jets and angry dinosaurs are involved, I can’t imagine a subwoofer will be desired except, maybe, in the largest rooms.

 

In terms of timbral accuracy, the speakers performed very well. On the “Old Italian Violin Test” (see the Magico S1 Mk II review in Issue 270 for details) the E-5s get a solid B-plus—there was no problem distinguishing a Stradivarius from a Guarneri del Gesù, and some parsing of different examples of the two instrument makers’ fiddles was possible as well. Female voices were richly characterized. A belated discovery for me is the singer/songwriter Sarah Jarosz. In addition to the emotional acuity of her songs, another reason I like her, I think, is because she sounds more than a little like a young Emmylou Harris. The Endeavors told me what was similar about their voices, and what was different.

The E-5s excelled with the presentation of spatial information, typically a forte of minimonitors. Swanson attributes this to several factors, the narrow baffle and the height of the speakers included. “In many concentric array speakers, the overall image size can be huge. The complicated part is getting the voices and instruments to be reproduced to scale, as well as in their accurate positions.” Swanson has evidently figured it out. The soundstage for an orchestra extends continuously in front of the listener: On the PentaTone SACD reissue of Kurt Masur’s reading of the Brahms Serenade No. 1, woodwinds were precisely localized and the second violins were clearly sitting interior to the firsts. I’m used to listening to the Mickey Hart cut noted earlier in multichannel, and the sense of an atmospherically vast space was apparent with just two Endeavors.

I enjoyed my time with the Von Schweikert Audio Endeavor E-5s immensely. The E-5s meet their design objectives and offer a majestic, full-scale representation of complex and dynamic musical material. Although they will most certainly perform well in a large space, they manage the feat in a more typical, less capacious domestic listening environment. The pack of contending high-end loudspeakers begins to thin when you reach the $30,000 price point, and the VSA Endeavor E-5s should definitely be on the short list for anyone with $30–$40k budgeted for speakers.

As for the Dominator MX-10s in Ruthless People, following Ken’s tour de force of salesmanship, the young headbanger declares, “I want it!” But then the customer’s plainly dressed pregnant teenaged wife walks into the demo room, and Ken, good soul that he is, conscientiously takes the couple instead to hear something much smaller and less costly. But, presumably, that’s not you. Give the VSA Endeavor E-5s an audition. You could be living large.

Specs & Pricing

Type: Three-way, vented box enclosure
Driver complement: One 1″ beryllium dome tweeter, two 6.5″ Kevlar cone midrange, four 7″ aluminum cone woofers
Frequency response: 27Hz–40kHz, +/–2dB
Impedance: 8 ohms
Sensitivity: 91dB
Recommended minimum amplifier power: 60 watts
Dimensions: 9″ x 66″ x 15″
Weight: 135 lbs.
Price: $35,000

VON SCHWEIKERT AUDIO
1040-A Northgate St.
Riverside, CA 92507
(951) 682-0706
vonschweikert.com

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