VMPS Ambience Tweeter Review

Add-on tweeters

In the Sixties I owned a pair of AR-3a speakers. They produced some of the best bass of their day and a decent midrange, but the tweeter rolled off considerably, giving them a somewhat dull sound. I bought a pair of add-on tweeter arrays for them that helped considerably. In the Seventies I owned a pair of FMI J speakers, on which the designer, Bob Fulton, had placed electrostatic tweeter arrays. Again, the add-on treble support helped impressively in extending the highs. Now, I own a pair of VMPS RM40 speakers that need no high-end extension. The tweeters already sound quite smooth, refined, and well extended. However, when I saw a few years ago that VMPS's owner and designer, the late Brian Cheney, offered a pair of add-on ambience tweeters for his speakers, I thought it only appropriate that I try them out.

Each tweeter unit is four-and-a-half inches square by one-and-a-half inches deep, with a built-in crossover, double-sided tape to secure it into position, and a pair of four-foot wires that connect to the binding posts of a person's main speakers. The crossover produces a steep slope beneath 7k Hz, with a top end that extends out to around 20k Hz. The units have no on or off switch, and the only way to control their output is by using a foam muffler over them. Also, while VMPS offer them for use with most of their own speakers, Brian tells me there is no reason why they can't be used with other, non-VMPS speakers as well.

In talking further with Brian, he said the idea was to experiment with the units. There is no absolute perfect placement for everyone. If you place them on the rear of your main speakers facing the back wall, they can increase the ambient sound of the high end. If you place them on the rear of the main speakers facing the side walls or if you place them on the sides of the main speakers facing outward, they can increase the width of the sound field. If you place them on top of the main speakers facing upward, they can increase the height of the sound field. And, of course, if you place them on top or on the sides of the main speakers facing forward, they can augment the sound of your main speakers' high end. Then there is also the matter of how high or how low you're going to position them on your main speakers. Whew!

Also, if you do decide to experiment with the placement, I suggest you keep the protective plastic strips on the tweeters' double-sided tape and use heavy-duty duct tape or Gorilla tape to fasten the tweeters to different locations temporarily. Once you fasten them permanently to the location of your choice, they could be a bear to remove.

Connecting the speakers takes a couple of minutes. After that, you're on your own. I took about an hour fussing with them, first positioning the tweeters on the rear of my main speakers toward the outside edge and facing the back wall, on the same level as my regular tweeters on the front. This seemed, indeed, to increase the sense of atmosphere and environmental impact of the high end. Then I moved them around a bit, facing backwards and facing the sides. In the end, I returned to my original placements, with the add-on tweeters not exactly firing toward the back wall since I have my main speakers toed in toward the primary listening position. So the add-ons actually fire at an angle toward the back wall.

Ultimately, did they make a difference? Did they effect an improvement? Yep, definitely. However, it was a subtle improvement, not a day-and-night improvement. Understand, if I were writing for a high-end journal, I'd probably say they made all the difference in the world and a person couldn't live without them. But I prefer not deal in black-and-white absolutes. The add-on tweeters make a small and pleasing difference, period, enough to warrant their use.

For me, in my listening room and the way I positioned them, the VMPS ambience tweeters slightly increased the sense of airiness in the high end, slightly increased the stage width, and slightly increased the depth of the sound field. OK, I can understand why the add-ons would increase air and width, but I still don't quite understand why they would increase depth, why the sound stage would now sound deeper. I suppose I should simply not question it and let good things be.

There was one thing, though: After a few minutes of early listening, I pressed my ear to one of the main speaker's built-in tweeters and then to the add-on tweeter behind it. The add-on tweeter sounded rougher to me, more spitty. However, after about eight or ten hours of continuous use, the add-ons seemed to smooth out and lose some of their initial grittiness. My advice: Let the ambience tweeters burn in for a while before judging them.

Nevertheless, I still hadn't convinced myself that the improvements I was hearing weren't imagination. If I were more clever, more inventive, or more ambitious, I might have rigged up an on-and-off device that I could use from my listening position. Being none of the above, I resorted to the next best thing: a pair of washcloths and the Wife-O-Meter. I used masking tape to fasten heavy washcloths over the add-ons tweeters, cloths that my wife could quickly roll up and place on top of the units so that within seconds she could either open up or dampen the tweeters' response. I had her do this a number of times while I listened from my preferred position in front of and between the main speakers. As you might expect, I heard the sound come more to life with the cloths removed, I heard more ambient air around the high end, I heard a wider stereo spread, and I heard greater depth to the sound field. Again, big differences? No, and they were differences that most people probably wouldn't notice without the dampening test. Indeed, they are differences some people might not discern even during the test. But I heard them, and I don't profess to have golden ears.

Now, to answer that question of whether they're worth it: Yes, for me the add-on tweeters were worth every penny of their $189 asking price, largely because I'm the kind of guy who is always trying to squeeze that last ounce of sound from my audio system without having to pay an arm and a leg to do it. The VMPS Ambience Tweeters afford me the luxury of slightly better sound at a modest cost. Seems like a deal to me, and if you can find a pair used, you might want to investigate them.

JJP

Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For more than 20 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2022 Accord EX-L Hybrid I stream music from my phone through its adequate but not outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through the phone into a Vizio soundbar system that has tolerably nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence. And finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technology that enables us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

Contact Information

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa