To be honest, I never expected a product this close to the absolute state of the art from VMPS. I have always been impressed with VMPS speakers Iii for combining value for money and true, musically natural deep bass. My daughter, for example, bought the VMPS Tower II because it was one of the few very good-sounding speakers she could afford that had the deep bass she, a former drummer, finds realistic.
However, VMPS has never aimed for the stratosphere of the high end before, so I did not expect to get real authentic reference-quality sound from the Su per Tower III Special Ribbon Edition (the only current Super Tower III) until it showed up for review. Brian Cheney, owner of VMPS, showed up with it—as he does for every buyer, to custom-tailor the speaker’s performance to the system it will be enhancing and the listening room it will be in (thus allaying any worries about tuning, room placement, or even moving the big speaker around).
The Special Ribbon Edition of the VMPS Super Tower III gets its superb sound from some of the most advanced ribbon drivers around, enough woofers to provide the last word in bass, and an enclosure large and heavy enough to minimize driver coloration. Its technology and sound quality are comparable to those of super reference speakers that cost at least $25,000 to $40,000 a pair, yet it’s almost affordable in comparison. Alas, in the high end, “almost affordable” has become frighteningly expensive. The Super Tower III Special Ribbon Edition sells for $16,400 (including electronic crossover) in piano black or piano white, or more if your taste runs to one of the 78 optional veneers.
If Cheney weren’t doing it for you, setting up and placing the VMPS Su per Tower III would be an adventure. The speaker is 6 feet, 4 inches tall, 19½ inches wide, and 17 inches deep. Under its veneers, the enclosure is made from synthetic granite, and the entire system weighs 450 pounds a side—hardly a speaker you casually move around. Yet it’s not a huge, visually intimidating box that makes you think someone has wired Dracula’s coffin for sound. Its external ribbon midrange and the shape of its damping foam make it look striking enough to be interesting, and it has a nice finish.
The Super Tower III’s complexity does, however, lead to subsidiary expenses. There is an active crossover for its woofers, which means owners need at least four channels of high- power amplification. In addition, the external passive crossover between the midrange and tweeter will tempt you to triamp. Buyers also need to have the necessary speaker cables for bi-amping or triamping (a significant cost if you want the best). Further, the VMPS needs space on all sides if it is to provide its best sound and the deep, flat bass it is capable of.
The VMPS Super Tower III Special Ribbon Edition is built in mirror-image pairs. Each cabinet has a midrange ribbon toward its inboard edge, a ribbon tweeter near its center, four 12-inch woofers along the outboard edge, and a 12-inch passive radiator firing down from the bottom. The electronic crossover and its power supply are separately housed.
The core of the speaker is an extraordinary midrange ribbon, 75 inches high and 4½ inches wide. This push-pull driver’s frequency response is given as 99 Hz to 7 kHz between —3 dB points; it provides some of the most detailed and transparent mid range I have ever encountered, crossing over with remarkable smoothness to the bass and treble. Behind the ribbon is an open-backed compartment lined with foam, to absorb longer, nondirectional, waves while passing sounds with shorter wavelengths. This minimizes the comb filtering that is characteristic of dipoles, while retaining the airiness and open soundstage that are their strengths. Perhaps because of the back-wave treatment (or perhaps be cause the midrange’s tall, narrow shape gives it line-source directional control), it provides tightly focused, almost holographic imaging, never exaggerating the size of the image as some other dipoles are prone to do.
The tweeter is a 6-inch, free-swinging monopole ribbon that offers good dispersion and excellent dynamic range. It takes over at 7 kHz and is flat to well beyond audibility, with a specified —3 dB point of 30 kHz. Because of its good dispersion and high crossover frequency, there is only a trace of discontinuity between this point-source tweeter and the line-source mid range, and even that trace is not apparent at reasonable listening distances. The VMPS Super Tower III does not pin you down to a small listening area; it is one of the few super-monitors I know of that lets you move relatively freely without losing touch with the music.
The size and sound of the bass array are stunning. The four 12-inch woofers, made by VMPS, all have cones of woven carbon fiber, large magnets, phase plugs, and damped baskets, but each of the four has a different resonant frequency. The 12-inch passive radiator, which also uses a damped basket, has user-adjustable mass loading to change its Q. This mix of bass drivers ex tends the rated response of the VMPS Super Tower III to —3 dB at 14 Hz.
The electronic crossover’s filter frequency is adjustable from 50 to 200 Hz but is set at the factory to 108 Hz. This crossover’s level setting is exceptionally precise, using a 10-turn pot for each channel, to help tailor the bass for the best performance in any listening room.
But with the Super Tower III, this tailoring is done for you. Cheney not only tweaks crossover settings but also adjusts the mix of bass drivers and damping to your specific room, speaker placement, and listening position. However, even this personal touch could not compensate for all of my listening room’s problems, although it certainly corrected overall bass response in a far more musically natural way than any electronic equalization I’ve yet heard. While some speakers provide far more useful forms of advanced phase and Q adjustment, or advanced servo-correction, I know of no other speaker (with the possible exception of the $156,000 Wilson Audio Specialties WAMM) whose price includes manufacturer setup and adjustment.
But, as I said earlier, I consider the ribbon drivers (most especially the midrange) to be the core of the Super Tower III. Together, the ribbon midrange and tweeter provided superb overall response, though I should also credit the outboard passive crossover, whose 12-dB/octave slopes produced an exceptionally seamless transition at both ends of the midrange. A calibrated control on this rear-mounted crossover enables you to adjust the tweeter level (if you dare change Cheney’s settings).
The only comparable-sounding ribbon drivers I’ve heard are those of the larger Apogee Acoustics and Magnepan speakers. Those speakers may produce a bit more open soundstage and may be a bit more forgiving in the upper octaves, but the Super Tower III seems to have flatter frequency response and more accurate timbre, and its soundstage is better focused and more three-dimensional. The Super Tower III’s ribbons also seem to sound a bit more de tailed and to have faster transient response than the ribbons used in the larger Genesis Technologies speakers, although both sound very musical. The main practical difference is that the midrange and upper octaves of the Super Tower III bring you a bit closer to’ the performance, while the Genesis sounds more like you’re sitting mid-hall.
Furthermore, the Super Tower III gave the best reproduction of ultralow bass I have ever encountered. I not only went through my full range of bass spectaculars but also spent a great deal of time listening to organ music to hear how well the speaker resolved the different low frequencies in extremely demanding passages. The VMPS Super Tower III did exceptionally well with different recordings of Saint Saën’s Third Sym phony, whose climax many other speakers turn into a blurred acoustic mess. The speaker also did very well with nonspectacular organ recordings, which test the limits of the speaker’s bass realism, clarity, and dynamics. Examples of this include John Balka Plays the Great Organ of Saint Mary’s Cathedral (TBG Productions CD8509), Bairstow, The Complete Organ Works of Francis Jackson at the York Monster (Amphion PHI CD 143), and Gerard Brooks Plays the Organ of St. Ouen (Priory PRCD 558). Most speakers simply can’t get the best out of these recordings—the Super Tower III can!
As an ex-drummer (albeit a very bad one), I was impressed with the tightness, detail, and natural sound of percussion at all frequencies, but I found it great fun to simply let the Super Tower III run at top volumes with bass-drum spectaculars like the opening passages of “Fanfare for the Common Man,” on Copland’s The Music of America (Telarc CD-80339). No sane audiophile is likely to hit the Super Tower III’s bass limits when listening to music. Its specifications indicate that it can produce sound-pressure levels of 120 dB down to its cutoff frequency of 16 Hz, and it got as low as any speaker I have ever tried. Wildly unreliable as bass measurements in the home are, my third-octave measurements of the VMPS Super Tower Ills ranked with those I made of the Genesis 300 and the subwoofers in the Polk Audio Signature Reference Theatre system as the smoothest I have ever garnered.
The Super Tower also provided superb ultralow bass performance from test tones, including the excellent subwoofer test band (track 18) on Chesky’s Gold Stereo and Sur round Sound Set-Up Disc (CHE151) and the more complex mix of tests on tracks 47 to 50, 58, and 59 of My Disk: The Sheffield Lab/A2TB Test Disc (CD451). These tracks make it easy to test both bass frequency and pitch, and I was still getting clean sound down to 25 Hz at over 95 dB SPL, plus a clean infrasonic presence down be low 20 Hz. They also make it easy to tell which speakers actually deliver the ultralow bass response claimed for them, particularly at truly loud volumes. Such revelations can be heartbreaking, but not in the case of this VMPS speaker.
All in all, the VMPS Super Tower III did a superb job of integrating all of its drivers to produce reference-quality sound. Hybrid speakers are always difficult to design properly, but the crossovers in the Super Tower III are both low and high enough so that you get the best out of the ribbon midrange. The shift in driver size between the midrange and treble ribbons was not ever apparent from normal listening positions, and their radiating pattern was wide enough to lock in a truly exceptional soundstage over a listening area three people wide as well as provide good off-axis performance without bouncing too much sound from the side walls. This is an audiophile-friendly supermonitor, not one with an ideal listening area so small that friends are excluded and head motions change the apparent imaging and mix of upper-octave energy.
The Super Tower III’s driver integration was a great strength with recordings of large musical groups (e.g., jazz bands, orchestras, and opera companies), where the speaker must tie everything together musically from deep bass to upper treble, provide every possible detail, and deliver a natural soundstage with three-dimensional imaging. The VMPS also did very well with deep male voices, solo piano, and cello, which quickly show up problems in driver integration and timbre.
The VMPS Super Tower III is remark ably revealing. This has great merit when your system has a top-quality front end, electronics, and cables. However, you will also hear any bad along with the good. Every adjustment, system tweak, and strength and weakness in the rest of your system will be clearly audible. Further, this is a speaker designed to get the best out of good recordings and not to forgive bad ones. There is no soothing rolloff of the upper midrange and treble, no euphonic blurring of detail, and no forgiving touch of added warmth. This VMPS is just about as accurate as your recordings and your system permit.
While it may not be directly relevant to musical listening, this aspect of the Super Tower III’s performance is a godsend to reviewers. The VMPS’s superior transparency superbly revealed differences between 24- bit, 96-kHz recordings and their 16-bit, 44.1-kHz counterparts, differences that were less clear and musically natural with a number of competing speakers. This was particularly impressive with subtle classical string music, as on the 24- bit, 96-kHz and the 16-bit, 44.1-kHz versions of David Chesky’s Three Psalms for String Orchestra (Chesky CD 163).
Similarly, the Super Tower III is exceptionally good for revealing sonic differences between cables. These differences are normally very subtle, and some speakers make them musically insignificant. I was most impressed with the way the speaker’s clean midrange and treble resolved the differences between the Kimber Select KS-10b and KS-1030 unbalanced interconnects and between the KS-1120 and KS-1130 balanced versions. These are all exceptionally clean, transparent interconnects, and few speakers would enable me to consistently distinguish, say, the transparency and low noise of the KS- 1130 over the KS- 1030. The Super Tower III made this much easier for me, and for non-audiophiles in blind listening tests. (I’d be doing a disservice if I did not tell you that these interconnects were clearly superior to any others I’ve tried; the only problem was that the sound of the KS-1030 and KS-1130 was too good to resist, and such jewels among interconnects don’t come cheap.)
Similarly, the Super Tower III’s exceptional bass helped me differentiate speaker cables, as the ultralow bass is an area where these differences actually do matter. I had good luck with AudioQuest, Monster, and Kimber and got very good performance for the money out of the Wireworld Atlantis cables.
Aside from the VMPS Super Tower III’s ability to reveal system defects, my only caveat is that you do need to be conscious of room size and setup. (No amount of adjustment, though, can correct basic room problems.) The Super Tower III should be 2 to 10 feet from the front wall and at least 2 feet from the side walls. Listeners also need to be at least 7 to 9 feet from the speaker for the sound from its drivers to fully integrate. You will need to experiment with speaker angles to get the best soundstage, although the setup visit from VMPS should solve this problem. Nonetheless, as good as the sound in my room was, listening to the Super Tower III in a dealer’s much larger show room demonstrated that the bass could be even better.
If you have the money and a reasonably large listening room, and care enough to work closely with VMPS during the setup visit, I can promise you superb sound. I don’t know of any other speaker that gets you as close to the limits of what speakers can do for anything approaching the same price.
Those who don’t have the money, how ever, should be aware that much of the Super Tower III’s same technology will soon be available in the form of the Special Rib bon Editions of the VMPS FF1/SRE ($11,000) and FF3/SRE ($8,400), both of which will feature 52-inch midrange ribbons. (I reviewed the earlier FF1, which had planar midrange drivers and dome tweeters, in the June 1994 issue.)
Buyers of these slightly less exalted products won’t get every feature of the Super Tower III or a personal visit to adjust the bass and help with setup, nor will they get every feature found in the Super Tower III, but they will get most of these features. The smaller VMPS speakers will also be easier to fit into small to medium-sized listening rooms (and easier to lift).
Adapted from 1998 Audio magazine article. Classic Audio and Audio Engineering magazine issues are available for free download at the Internet Archive (archive.org, aka The Wayback Machine)