Fresh From the Bench: Vanatoo Transparent Zero Powered Speakers

During the AXPONA 2017 show in Chicago, IL, Stuart Yaniger visited the Vanatoo room and was greatly impressed with the small and inexpensive proposition of the Transparent Zero powered speakers. As he noted in his report for our Audio Voice newsletter, they “seemed to punch far out of their weight class. I’d love to get a pair into my lab for extended listening and measurement.” That’s precisely what he did, and accounts for here. This is the most extensive and detailed review these extremely affordable speakers will get, because, as Yaniger writes, "I think the engineering is enough to merit the high ratio of words to price."
 
As Stuart Yaniger writes: The Vanatoo Transparent Zero wireless speaker is an exemplar of the old saying, “Good engineering costs no more than poor engineering." The Transparent Zeros are a two-way system with a 4.5” bass-midrange cone driver, a similarly sized passive radiator, and a 1” soft dome tweeter, all housed in an enclosure smaller than a lunchbox. The enclosure is oddly shaped in a roughly trapezoidal manner, and includes a plastic frame member that doubles as a prop for the speakers when they’re used on stands to allow the passive radiator to do its thing unimpeded. They are set up to be used on a desktop for computer sound, next to TV sets for home theater sound, and on stands as free-standing mini-monitors, depending on the orientation and the DSP settings. On a desktop, the passive radiator points up, and the plastic prop can be used as a handle — or removed if the esthetics bother you. For mounting on stands, the passive radiator points down, with the prop giving it space to emit. There’s a ton of features and flexibility packed in here, so I hope you’re sitting down and comfortable before reading through this.

This article was originally published in audioXpress, January 2018.

Read this article online here.