Blaupunkt VPc 542 Pro Component Speakers

A two-way speaker component set made to sell to high end customers. The build quality is very high with features proven to give higher performance. The midbass cones are made with a cost effective blend of Carbon fibre and glass fibre, making them light and stiff but not as expensive as pure Carbon fibre cones. (In fact I have heard pure glass fibre cones that sounded excellent.) They feature a phase plug protruding out through the pole of the magnet that feels like solid metal to the touch but not to the tapped tooth, maybe through being lacquered. (Odd admission, a geologist can tell hardness of minerals and rocks with a tap on the teeth gently so as not to hurt yourself! But you can tell between dense plastic and metal with your teeth. It’s where all the old coin-testing gags from the western movies come fromoh and I studied geology to degree level.) The tweeters are bigger diameter than those found in the Vc range, although they have the same mounting depth. The set arrives with three small baggies of fixings to bolt the three items in or down with as well as speaker cable extensions for the tweeters alone, to lengthen their ready-terminated fitted tail leads. The crossovers are housed in small sections of Aluminium heatsink extrusion and look like baby amplifiers. Very cute. You remove two Allen headed bolts to reveal their fixing screws. Very posh. The passives are simple designs with nine components air-cored inductors, Bennic caps and ‘Mate Ford’ brand ceramic resistors, with a simple -3dB attenuation switch to hook some of these resistors into the HF circuit. If you remove the rubber boots on the midbass’ magnets, you reveal a full sized magnet base decal with model and specification details shown on it. I have never seen that done before. Usually a boot means you can leave it looking rough as pig underneath.
The underwear is good too. There’s a large and obviously top grade linen spider and the terminals are miniature Gold plated squeeze posts with 2.5mm holes and a really good grippy spring inside. Another thing I have never seen is an offering of a mesh grille with some speaker bogey (fixing mastic) to replace the open ‘frame’ style grilles they come with.
– Power Handling 100w RMS
– Impedance 3 Ohms
– Sensitivity 91dB 1w/1M
– Passband 45Hz to 25kHz
– Tweeter diameter 28mm
– Tweeter Mounting Depth (measured) 25mm
– Midbass Mounting Depth 62mm without rubber magnet boot, 65mm with it fitted
– Cone: Woven Carbon/Glass fibre with central Aluminium phase plug through centre
– Gold plated squeeze-fit speaker terminals to midbass driver, decal on back of magnet hidden under rubber boot
– Tweeter: Teteron fabric dome with choice of frame or mesh grille and adhesive supplied
– Crossover slope & point: 12dB/18dB per octave (frequency not quoted) with -3dB HF attenuation switch
– Crossovers housed in extruded aluminium heatsink amp-alike sections with Velocity branding
– Chassis: cast powder coated alloy, rubber boot to magnet
– Complete with: surface/flush/angle mount tweeter kit, three bags of fixings & tweeter wires
Review by Adam Rayner
An impressive pile of engineering to get out of the box, these have plenty of mass. I liked the eyeball mount tweeter housings, mostly for their having such clearly high end tweeters living inside them. You get a mesh grille as well as the open frame type they come fitted with and so if you will have small fingers likely to poke them in as they are just too soft and temptingly delicate for kids not to abuse them (we have all seen this in every shop) then you can use some of the special speaker-bogey and mastic these into place instead of the cool looking open-frames.
A good indicator of the engineering thought gone into these is the way the crossovers are made. The heatsink section comes off the base plate circuit board by dint of removal of two Allen headed shortie bolts. Once slipped off, you can see that the polymer base piece that holds the board has two small brass bushings set into it, to ensure the bolts always have purchase. This could easily have been left as an easy-to-strip tapped hole through what is a dense plastic and as they would normally only be fitted the once, it could have been all they need. This is reassuring stuff. The frame grilles for the midbass drivers look really cool with the phase plug showing through the middle like some sort of acoustic nipple in a saucy peep-hole bra.
The output is definitely a notch above ‘commodity’ quality. The tweeters in particular are sweet and fast and excellent with the rare tingly ting sounds. That�s also where the edges of odd raspy bits in organic samples within electronic music will be found, as well as the fingernails across acoustic guitar string windings and the sound of a girl vocalist’s tongue peeling away from the roof of her mouth with a licky snicker sound. The technical term is ‘mouth sounds’ and along with the space a sound is recorded in coming through is one of the classic HiFi writers’ things to indicate good detail retrieval.
The bass cones are obviously well driven by the serious motors and the small five inch cones did their best to push some air around. They are fast and light and obviously very rigid, with good adherence to the bass line while still playing the rest up to the chest register of vocals with accuracy. A good adjective would be ‘Sweet’ as there is no harshness which is so often the case in bully-grade Americana or the more insane Scandinavian kit.
I had to ruin a set of baffle boards with my round Surform in order to get these speakers to fit, so they are no way a standard-fit locator. Their cast chassis are deep and broad and have strong ribs, as well as a lug that sticks out opposite the speaker terminal block, making these a difficult panel-fit. Thus I would heartily recommend only using this size if space really doesn’t permit any bigger. Otherwise use the bigger size up and make a good custom location for them and you will be rewarded. A serious slice of high end style output without the mad costs involved with some brands.
These could easily have been in the Grand Component Jamboree and done well versus their peers at the £200 mark. As it is they were tested on their own, apart from trying the less costly products in the Blaupunkt Velocity Vc range.
All in all a very good set of speakers that sound great on their own brand of amplification (I used the Velocity VA275 amplifier recently reviewed to test them.) and are well made as well as good looking. A little bulky to fit but that’s because they are so seriously well built.
Overall 8.2
Sound Quality 8
Build Quality 8
Power Handling 9
Efficiency 8
Value For Money 8