_{All photos by the author.}

_{Prices listed are in US$.}

Back in February, Mark Schifter of Vera-Fi Audio sent me a pair of his Vanguard Scout standmount loudspeakers. They’re a compact, two-way, bass-reflex design that perform at a level far beyond what their $299 MSRP might suggest. The Scouts featured real wood-veneered cabinets that were crafted with precision to an exceptional level of fit and finish—I would never have guessed from their appearance that they were manufactured in China, or that they retailed for so little. Mark has cultivated relationships with small-shop craftsmen stretching back decades, and the quality of the cabinets they produce is beyond reproach. And at their price, the Scouts are incredibly musical and do so many things so well that within weeks of their arrival they’d become my go-to loudspeakers in my all-analogue room. How good are the Scouts? They managed to displace a $2500/pair of critically-acclaimed loudspeakers, relegating them to a nearby storage closet for months on end. And as the Scout experience continued to astound over the first half of the year, they proved remarkably adept at matching up with a variety of amplifier designs, and their sound quality continued to improve significantly as the months rolled along. You can read my full review of the Vanguard Scouts on Positive Feedback here.

The XSA Labs Vanguard Compact Monitors

Much of the Scout’s goodness trickled down from the prior work of their designer, Viet Nguyen (Mark’s partner in Vera-Fi Audio), who borrowed heavily from the technology he utilized in his $995 XSA Labs Vanguard compact monitors. The Vanguard is based on the classic British LS3/5A specification, and is what Mark describes as a “fresh interpretation” of the classic British bookshelf design, offering a “bolder and sexier sound” than its pedigreed, more expensive counterparts thanks to a number of refinements, such as a slightly deeper cabinet for a tad more bass extension and improved dynamics, and a sophisticated inverted Harsch transient-perfect crossover. XSA Labs is also a joint venture between Mark and Viet, and unlike the Scouts which are manufactured entirely in China, the Vanguards are assembled in the U.S. from cabinets, components, and drivers of Chinese origin. I was mightily impressed with the performance of the Scouts, and was more than a bit curious to hear what one of Viet Nguyen’s less cost-restrictive designs might be capable of. The Vanguards are generally built to order, but Mark had a slightly blemished pair in his warehouse that could be shipped to me within the week.

When I received the “blemished” pair and unboxed it, I was astonished by the Vanguards’ level of fit and finish and the perfection of their stained satin brown birch cabinets. The blemish in question was so insignificant as to be quite nearly invisible. It’s still amazing at this low price point that Mark would grade these Vanguards as “B-Stock”—their elegant appearance oozed quality. Like all LS3/5A-based designs, the Vanguards are sealed-box, acoustic suspension loudspeakers with removable front driver panels. And despite their relatively diminutive size, their birch plywood cabinets made them quite heavy. The magnetic grilles are a very nice touch—even though I do all my listening with grilles removed, there were no unsightly nibs protruding from the baffles. A pair of 5-way, heavily-plated binding posts are directly attached to the rear panel, and are a step above those on the Scouts. The Vanguards measure 7.5″ wide x 12″ tall and 8″ deep, and weigh just over 11lbs. each; they’re smaller and lighter than the Scouts they replaced!

Viet Nguyen’s design for the Vanguard hews fairly closely to the LS3/5A specification, but varies from it by employing a larger 1.1″ (28mm) dome tweeter and a larger 5.25″ (133.35mm), heavily-doped paper-cone mid-bass driver. The Vanguards are relatively flat across the frequency range between 80 Hz to 22 kHz, with a -6 dB dip at 70 Hz. Their bass extension doesn’t go quite as deep as the Scouts, which are a bass-reflex design, but they also didn’t seem bass-shy in my nearfield listening environment. Their peak power handling is rated at 50 watts RMS, their sensitivity at 83 dB/W/m, and while that may seem low-ish, their nominal 8-ohm impedance makes them a fairly easy load to drive—my PrimaLuna EVO 300 tube integrated amp’s quad of Sovtek 6550 power tubes (approx. 44Wpc/8 ohms) can push them to ear-splitting levels without clipping and with no discernible distortion. As in all my previous listening with the Scouts, the Vanguards were paired with a Caldera 10 subwoofer, which takes the overall frequency spectrum down a couple of octaves. They play full range without a crossover, blend seamlessly with the Caldera 10 sub, and never showed any sign of stress or distortion during playback.

When I received the Vanguard Scouts months earlier, a pair of Vera-Fi’s matching stands were included in the shipment. They were exceptionally well-made, and were the perfect height to place the Scouts at my ear level. However, when the Vanguards recently arrived and were positioned on the stands, the tweeters were about an inch lower due to their different cabinet geometry. I procured a set of eight IsoAcoustics mini-pucks to place under the Vanguards on the stands, which raised them to the correct listening height. Over the course of my audiophile experience, I’d never regularly used standmount monitors for my day-to-day listening, and I’d never given any real consideration to the benefit that filling their stands with sand might offer. Now that the significantly more upscale Vanguards had arrived, I decided to get the most from the standmount experience and proceeded to fill the stands with sand, which ended up taking much less time than I had anticipated. With everything now ready to go, and to quote Max in Where The Wild Things Are, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

Set up and Listening Results

I’d been advised that the Vanguards would probably need at least 100 hours of burn-in before they’d really sing, so I let them play for an extended period before doing any critical listening. I did a lot of online investigation with regard to LS3/5A placement considerations, with almost everyone recommending something along the lines of a Cardas Golden Ratio arrangement, but with no toe-in toward the listening position. Right out of the gate, the sound was pretty horrible; the Vanguards displayed a harsh midrange and a fairly pronounced treble squawk, along with a fairly indistinct stereo image. I soldiered on and started experimenting with the slightest amount of toe-in, which didn’t improve anything tonally, but really improved the soundstage focus. I gradually increased the toe-in, and also moved the speakers slightly outward toward the sidewalls, which also helped to more firmly anchor the soundstage. My all-analogue room is not particularly large—it’s a nearfield listening arrangement—but the sound was at least acoustically balanced.

After about 20-30 hours of continuous play, I listened to the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Linda Ronstadt’s Get Closer, and Sea Level’s eponymous first album. Most of the tonal anomalies and treble squawk I initially noted were much less prominent, the mid-bass was more well controlled, and the imaging was substantially improved. I think the IsoAcoustics pucks helped a lot. The stock rubber pads on the stands were spaced too widely for me to be able to properly position the Vanguards; removing them solved that problem. I’ve done this kind of setup countless times, and despite the obvious incremental improvements, I still wasn’t blown away by the Vanguards’ performance. My expectations were unusually high, and I was beginning to believe that perhaps they weren’t going to work in my system. Still, I continued to let them play for days on end. Then, as we approached the 100-hour mark (obviously the witching hour!), the tonal character of the Vanguards miraculously changed, and I suddenly found myself catatonically spellbound in my listening chair!

Giles Martin’s remix of Abbey Road was now more spatially and tonally correct, more viscerally dynamic, and took on a newfound level of realism that had eluded me in previous listens to this LP. Linda Ronstadt put on a clinic with her vocal range on Get Closer, with renderings that were equal parts angelic and mellifluous (“Easy For You To Say,” “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” “My Blue Tears”), but the album’s more aggressive rock numbers like the title track and “I Knew You When” were delivered with her trademark shout/scream that had me on the edge of my seat. And the jazz/rock fusion of Sea Level was rendered with an almost overwhelming onrush of power and dynamics. The opening track, “The Rain In Spain,” is a rambling opus that viscerally and emotionally fuses elements of the Allman Brothers Band (Sea Level was a spin-off of the ABB), while also presenting a level of jazz/rock sophistication you wouldn’t expect from a quartet of Southern boys. The frenetic pace slows to a crawl on “Scarborough Fair,” where Chuck Leavell’s mastery at the keyboard delivers a performance that’s absolute ear candy. The Vanguards were able to create an illusion of “you-are-there” realism that had me rethinking what’s possible at the $1k price point in a range-limited loudspeaker that not only has high-end pretensions, but also delivers on that promise by presenting music that isn’t lacking in any respect. In less than a month, these speakers’ very distinct advantages over the Scouts had become incredibly apparent, but they retail for over three times the Scouts’ price, so no real surprise there. Still, with the Scouts, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

I spent more time with the Vanguards, listening to a number of LPs I’d reviewed earlier in the year using the Vanguard Scouts in the system. Starting with Impex Records’ superb reissue (on super cool green vinyl!) of Jennifer Warnes’s The Hunter, another record of diverse moods that shifts on the fly from Warnes’s almost liquid soprano vocals to crushing percussive transients, like the talking drum in the track “Way Down Deep”, and the Vanguards handled them all with appropriate levels of grace, power, and impressive dynamics. Shifting to Rhino’s 2024 Record Store Day box set, Linda Ronstadt: The Asylum Years 1973-1977, which I gave high marks to this past April, I again made comparisons between my original LPs and the new pressings. But hearing the new pressings over the system with the Vanguards proved they’re not only good, but exceptional LPs that absolutely smoke my Asylum label originals in every possible way. The RSD set was pressed by Optimal in Germany, the lacquers were cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering and, judging by the superb sound, the original master tapes were used. With the Scouts in the system in April, these LPs sounded pretty fabulous. But through the Vanguards, you could hear more deeply into the music, due in no small part to Viet Nguyen’s impressive crossover design, which gives the speakers the kind of midrange and treble transparency that the Scouts could approach but not match. Again, I sat transfixed, moving only when necessary to flip LP sides and dust the record surfaces.

Final Thoughts

When Stereophile’s John Atkinson first used the word gobsmacked way back when to describe his utter lack of words regarding whatever he was hearing at the time, I don’t think he realized that he was spawning a generation of copycat responses—but here we are. Gobsmacked is the only word I can legitimately use to describe my inability to cogently express my emotions while listening to the Vanguards. A friend also has a pair, and his consistently incoherent ramblings about the Vanguards always ended with, “You have to hear these loudspeakers! You’ll never believe it until you do!” And he was absolutely correct. (Thank you Finnbogi!) Any hesitation on my part was always rooted in their diminutive size and my personal lack of confidence that they’d be able to play everything in my record collection convincingly. Obviously, that preconception had already started to melt away with the Vanguard Scouts, and Viet Nguyen’s “bolder and sexier sound” approach with the Vanguards has made listening to every musical genre the kind of reality that doesn’t limit you to only vocals, acoustic jazz or chamber music. From Kraftwerk to Metallica, Devo, Black Sabbath, Stone Temple Pilots, you name it, XSA Labs’ Vanguard compact monitors come very highly recommended. And they pair so remarkably well with my PrimaLuna EVO 300 tube integrated amp that I can’t imagine another pair of loudspeakers in my all-analogue system that could provide the level of satisfaction I’m getting from the Vanguards!

Price: $995-$1095 USD (depending on finish), priced factory direct

XSA Labs
xsa-labs.com