[smilach]

I purchased a pair of VR-33's here on AC from mca and the first thing I want to say is thanks Mike!  Mike was great to work with and I recommend him highly.  Unfortunately, he didn't have the owner's manual for the speakers.

I emailed info@vonschweikertaudio.com back in August asking for a paper or electronic copy of the VR-33 owner's manual.  My email was never answered.  I emailed again last weekend and again received no response.

The Von Schweikert Audio web site is essentially a marketing brochure and contains no support page and no documentation for any past or current products.  Does anyone have an electronic copy of the VR-33 owner's manual they can email to me?  If so, please pm me and I will be happy to get my email address to you.

Thanks everyone!

[smilach]

I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to stereo5 for sending me a .pdf of the VR-33 owner's manual.  In all of the Circles, fellow owners are a tremendous resource across topics and products.

To Von Schweikert Audio, you market the VR-33 as an Internet-only product yet offer no links for customer support or documentation for that product on your VSA or Vortex web sites.  An email I sent to info@vonschweikertaudio.com with the subject line, "Speaker Choices" got me six responses filled with marketing BS in just 12 days.  Clearly, the purpose of all the messages was to push me into purchasing speakers and cables to replace my VR-4 Gen II's.  Two emails to info@vonschweikertaudio.com requesting an owner's manual for the VR-33's garnished not one response in seven weeks. 

While the business world can be cruel and unforgiving, these issues can be resolved by any business owner that thinks they matter.  My takeaway is if my income isn't above the 99th percentile, I don't deserve so much as a download link for a current product that could be created by any number of high school students living in the vicinity of Riverside, CA.

[mca]

Sorry you had such a hard time getting an owners manual. Hope you are happy with the speakers though! I had a pretty hard time communication wise with my new VR-35 speakers. The first time one arrived with heavy freight damage. I sent it back and the second time it arrived without a working tweeter. Had to send it back again and finally got a working speaker the third time it arrived. The whole thing took about two months of waiting patiently to get a functioning set of speakers. I can at least say now that they are here and functioning, they are sounding very good!

[smilach]

No problem on the manual.  You gave me a heads up that you didn't have it and VSA didn't respond to my emails!

I am enjoying the VR-33's and will keep them because in my "less than medium sized" listening room the ability to move the speakers close to the wall (plus the larger sweet spot) makes them easier to live with than my VR-4 Gen II's.  That said, the 33's do not "bury" or "out class" my Gen II's.  There are simply some things that properly set up 33's do that the Gen II's do not and some things that properly set up Gen II's do that the 33's do not. 

One example is the more precise imaging of the Gen II's IF you are seated in precisely the right spot.  Another is the bass.  On pipe organ, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and the infamous Telarc recording of the 1812 Overture, it is quite obvious the bass from my Gen II's digs deeper while the upper bass is more prominent with my 33's.  The Gen II's offer more treble detail such as fingers on frets and picks on guitar or mandolin strings but occasionally they sound etched.  The 33's are more forgiving and euphonic but miss those details.

What differences have you noted between your 33's and your 35's?  It was my impression the differences were cabinet construction, crossover changes to accommodate bi-wiring and the same drivers, but matched more closely.

[BigSwede]

When I was buying my VR-33s and then had a problem with one of the end caps, I had much better success calling VSA on the telephone than email... they've never struck me as an overly e-savvy outfit.

[Devon Von Schweikert]

I purchased a pair of VR-33's here on AC from mca and the first thing I want to say is thanks Mike!  Mike was great to work with and I recommend him highly.  Unfortunately, he didn't have the owner's manual for the speakers.

I emailed info@vonschweikertaudio.com back in August asking for a paper or electronic copy of the VR-33 owner's manual.  My email was never answered.  I emailed again last weekend and again received no response.

The Von Schweikert Audio web site is essentially a marketing brochure and contains no support page and no documentation for any past or current products.  Does anyone have an electronic copy of the VR-33 owner's manual they can email to me?  If so, please pm me and I will be happy to get my email address to you.

Thanks everyone!

Greetings VSA Audiocircle Member "smilach"

First off I want to apologize for the less-than-satisfactory customer service you experienced when attempting to contact us here at VSA. I assure you, and I sincerely hope that almost any member of this forum can back me up on this, that this is indeed an irregularity. We pride ourselves on our world-class products and our excellent customer service. So on a personal level, and from all of us at VSA, I want to again apologize for the lack of response to your request.

That being said we are currently at work creating a dedicated Product Manuals page on our website to prevent this problem from happening again. You are correct that this information should be more easily available and we want to make sure that happens. As you all know our office staff have only just today returned from RMAF and there is still much work to be done with regards to getting back to business as usual, so it may take a day or two to get the page launched. However, when I heard about your issue I contacted our webmaster immediately and I will continue to follow up with him until he has finished.

Thank you for choosing VSA and I hope that we can put this hickup behind us and continue to provide you the best possible listening experience going forward. Feel free to reach out to me personally with any future requests or problems.

Sincerest regards,

Devon Von Schweikert
Business Manager

Happy Listening!

P.S. I took the liberty of searching through our info@vonschweikertaudio.com email address to find your original email and I discovered that Albert had in fact replied to your request for a manual on September 5th, 2014 at 7:19PM. Without getting too technical, our "info" email address forwards to multiple addresses (Albert's included) and when he hit reply he may have accidentally returned the message to info instead of to your email address. We will do what we can to avoid this in the future.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

[smilach]

Good Evening Devin -

Thank you very much for your reply but more importantly, for your time, attention and effort reaching out to your webmaster and doing the research on your inbound and outbound emails to and from your email address.  Across the decades there are so many speakers that carried the VS name it would be quite an accomplishment to bring all that history and documentation to a single web site.

Back in 2011, Albert posted in this forum that he would be writing a very detailed manual about the VR-33, how it interacts with the room, and what can be done to optimize the VR-33's reproduction of sound.  That manual didn't appear in the forums and the existing owner's manual doesn't provide tremendous detail on those topics.  Is there a chance this project could be raised from the dead and included on your web site since there are so many VR-33 owner's out there?

-Scott

[Devon Von Schweikert]

Good Evening Devin -

Thank you very much for your reply but more importantly, for your time, attention and effort reaching out to your webmaster and doing the research on your inbound and outbound emails to and from your email address.  Across the decades there are so many speakers that carried the VS name it would be quite an accomplishment to bring all that history and documentation to a single web site.

I appreciate your understanding. Unresponsiveness is frustrating, and all the more so when you need something. I am happy to correct this. 

Interestingly enough a pet project of mine has been to sort through our old files and reorganize the VSA library, so most of the work is already done! Some of the legacy items will still take a bit of time to find and update, however.

Back in 2011, Albert posted in this forum that he would be writing a very detailed manual about the VR-33, how it interacts with the room, and what can be done to optimize the VR-33's reproduction of sound.  That manual didn't appear in the forums and the existing owner's manual doesn't provide tremendous detail on those topics.  Is there a chance this project could be raised from the dead and included on your web site since there are so many VR-33 owner's out there?

-Scott

Yes I remember this project. After much discussion we had ultimately decided that it was much easier to have an actual conversation with the customer regarding his/her room layout, placement, system, etc., than it was to try and create a roughly standardized layout for a variety of listening environments. And so we offer a preliminary guide to setup, giving customers an idea of our design theory behind the speaker and it's intended function with the room, and then encouraging them to call our office and speak to one of our engineers so we can individually assist them. Every room is different, so every solution is different; and this also helps to build that personal relationship we like to have with our customers. We also encourage our customers to join this Audiocircle group and present their questions here for answers from other customers who have experienced a similar setup.

I will bring this up with Albert, though, and see if maybe he can put together a more detailed theory paper on the placement of this unique speaker. I expect it might take some time as he is currently wrapping up the design of his mega-speaker: the VR-111 (you can read about this and Robert Harley's tour of Albert's design studio over at TAS http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/robert-harley-visits-albert-von-schweikerts-design-laboratory/)

[JackD201]

Hi Devon,

I recommend you try and contact your webmaster from around 2004/2005. There used to be an area in the old VSA site where you could access all this info on legacy products from the Von Schweikert Research (NY) era. It just might still be on a mirror server somewhere. Happy hunting!

Jack D.