Vandersteen Audio
2
Model lCi+ Operation Manual
Bare wires should never come into contact with the speaker's aluminum dress plate
while the amplifier is on. Amplifier damage could result.
Vandersteen speakers will produce excellent, satisfying sound placed almost anywhere
in a room. With all the possible variables in room layout, there are no magical formulas
for determining the best speaker placement in every room. Since every room is different,
we recommend that you try the speakers in every domestically acceptable location to
find where they sound the best in your particular listening environment. The following
sections contain suggestions that may be helpful in your placement experiments.
SETTING-UP THE SPEAKERS
CONNECTION
1.
With the amplifier off, place the banana plug into the
jack on the rear of the speaker with the ground ridge
toward the left (black) terminal and loosen the set screws
in the banana plug by inserting a small blade screwdriver
into the rear of the plug.
2.
Strip approximately 0.3 inches of insulation from the
speaker ends of the speaker cable. The speaker cables
should be the same length and no longer than necessary.
3.
Verify cable polarity. Then, from the bottom, carefully
push the exposed ground side of the speaker cable
through the hole in the ground (left) side of the banana
plug and tighten the set screw.
4.
Repeat step 3 for the positive side of the speaker cable
and the positive (right) side of the banana plug.
5.
Connect cables to the amplifier in the normal manner.
Verify polarity at the amplifier connection.
SPEAKER PLACEMENT
Problems can arise when you attempt to place a given
loudspeaker, either front radiating or dipole, into a typical
domestic environment. These problems are a function of
the physical dimensions of the room. The room's dimen-
sions dictate where in the room a node or anti-node will
occur. Frequency response dips and peaks caused by nodes
and anti-nodes can easily overwhelm the inherent accuracy
of a loudspeaker.
If, for example, you place a loudspeaker with excellent
frequency response characteristics in the corner of a room,
you will increase response below about 200Hz by 6dB. This
particular condition is a worst-case example, but similar
conditions apply throughout the room to some extent.
ODD DIMENSIONS PLACEMENT
Research on speaker placement has produced a
method for reducing the nodes and anti-nodes in many
rooms by positioning the loudspeakers on the odd dimen-
sional intersections of the room. The odd dimensional inter-
sections are the intersections of the imaginary lines you
would draw if you divided the length and width of your
room by odd numbers.
As an example, we will use a rectangular room measur-
ing 14 feet wide by 18 feet long. We'll assume that you want
to set the speakers on one of the short walls, although this
method works equally well for long wall placement.
The first step is to take the length of the room,
(18 feet in our example) convert it from feet to inches,
(18 x 12 = 216) and divide the result by odd numbers.
216 divided by 3 is 72 (all to the nearest inch)
216 divided by 5 is 43
216 divided by 7 is 31
216 divided by 9 is 24
216 divided by 11 is 20
216 divided by 13 is 17 (And so on; eventually the lines
start to pile on top of each other
or the speaker runs into the wall.)
The results are the distances in inches that the center of the
speakers can be placed into the length of the room, away
from the wall behind them, to minimize nodes and anti-
nodes.
Now we can graph these odd dimensions distances on a
drawing of the room. We only need to graph them for the
wall where we intend to place the speakers.
