CES 2018

Richard Vandersteen, hailing from Hanford, California, was on hand to show off his new creation, the M5-HPA monoblock amplifier. Vandersteen notes that this is a high-pass amplifier, not intended to go full-range, for a system that would also include a subwoofer. The selectable high pass settings are 20Hz, 40Hz, 80Hz, 100Hz or 200Hz. The 80 and 100 Hz settings are optimized to work with Vandersteen subwoofers.

"The best thing about high-passing a speaker is getting that low frequency load out of the amp and getting all of that energy out of the main speakers, which cleans things up a lot," he adds. This also reduces modulation distortion in the main speakers.

"Likes its big brother, the liquid-cooled M7, It's two singled-ended amplifiers with the speaker load connecting them together," Vandersteen explained. "It's a push-push design with all the signal transistors being N-channel bipolar devices with no emitter resistors, no fuses or circuit breakers, but instead a very advanced protection circuit. In addition there are ten separate power supplies and the whole thing is floating above ground."

I'm pretty sure he means floating electrically.

The amps are $15,000 a pair, 150 watts into 8 ohms, 300 watts into 4 ohms, and are available in March.