[Russell Dawkins]

In the Stereophile blog coverage of the show the VMPS RMD 60 is shown without the constant directivity waveguide. Was it demo'd this way, or is the waveguide still part of the design?
http://blog.stereophile.com/rmaf2007/101407vmps/

[Brian Cheney]

In a similar room at CES this January I took one of the waveguides off, which gave a nice combination of smoothness and dispersion.  I left it up to Wayne if he wanted to use one, two, or no CDWG depending on room treatment and associated gear.

[John Casler]

In the Stereophile blog coverage of the show the VMPS RMD 60 is shown without the constant directivity waveguide. Was it demo'd this way, or is the waveguide still part of the design?
http://blog.stereophile.com/rmaf2007/101407vmps/

Hi Russell,

Thanks for the link, below is the pic from it.

The RM v60 is a very sophisticated speaker, and as such has many elements to adjust the sonic properties.

It has the twin L-Pads to create balance between the tweeter, the MR panels, and the woofer section.

It has the foam wedge that can adjust to very specific degrees of dipolar/open baffle charachteristics, to monopole.

And it also has the CDWG's which offer either a very "directional" presentation when off, to a highly dispersive radiation when they are on.

When "off" the neopanels and tweeter will direct the sound to a focused sweet spot, equidistant between the speakers, and present "stunning" imaging and soundstage from that postition, as well as incredible detail and resolution.

When they are "on", the sound of the tweeter and Neopanels is then "dispersed" in a rather constant directivity over the frequency range covered by those drivers.

This then increases the "Sweet Spot" vertically and horizontally to allow a soundstage and imaging to be "set up" from a much wider listening area, but at a small expense of some detail and resolution.

All of these elements, are used in consideration of your listening preferences, and the psychoacoustics of the listening room.

Smaller live rooms, can sometimes create too many or too much early reflection(s), and this might suggest that the CDWG be removed to reduce such room distortion.

below the picture is a quote by Jason Victor Serinus from the Stereophile article your URL pointed to.

I was impressed by the extremely full-range presentation of the VMPS RMD-60 loudspeaker ($9950/pair) paired with the VMPS Very Solid Subwoofer ($1850)—especially with the system's admirable bass control.

[Wayne1]

Russell,

As John and Brian both point out, there are many areas for adjustment on the RM60. It is both the blessing and the curse of VMPS speakers that they are not "plug and play".

I had to make many decisions as to how to set up the speakers in a very short time. While I was in the same room as last year, everything else was different.

New room treatments, new speakers, that had maybe 150 hours on them before being shipping to the show. New amps, that had maybe about the same amount of time. New front end.

In THIS room, using THIS particular gear, I felt the speakers sounded more dynamic with the waveguides off. Perhaps in a larger room with different amps, the speakers would sound better with waveguides on.

I do want to thank Zybar and mgalusha for helping me set up the room. I was making small adjustments to the level controls, position of the speakers, position of the foam wedge, woofer crossover point, woofer level, amount of room mode cut, position of acoustic treatment while they would give me feedback on what sounded good or bad. Movement of room treatment and foam wedge was done in 1/16" increments.

I only needed to remove one small fingernail of putty to get the bass where I wanted it. There were lots of room modes for the low end. There wasn't enough room in the room to put in big enough traps to smooth that out. If you moved about the room, the bass would vary quite a bit. I had to make the decision on how to set it up.

At least the guy from Stereophile agreed with my taste in the room setup