VR Tour

We hope you enjoy this brief photo tour of our facilities. If you’re passing through Upstate New York on your way to Canada or the 1000 Islands region, be sure to stop by for a "real" tour. We can also turn you on to some of the best boating and fishing you’ll find anywhere.

We think that "seeing" our facility should give some comfort to prospective members of the VR club. We know that all too many high-end audio companies are nothing more than home businesses run out of the basement or garage. We know of several loudspeaker companies where the assembly and even the testing is done off-site by third parties. There’s nothing wrong with starting this way -- heck, we started in the garage years ago too—but to give proper service and attention to detail, you need to have the kind of equipment and control that only dedicated manufacturing facilities can provide.

Here’s Linda Von Schweikert (we just call her "mom’) at the front door. When you enter the lobby, Linda will probably be the first person you see. The executive offices and listening room are located in the front of our building and Linda’s office is right off the lobby.

Our dedicated listening room is also just off the lobby. Most of the critical listening and final circuit adjustments are done here. If you think this "fish-eye" view is strange, wait till you stand in there in person! It’s a large room with no parallel walls or consistent angles, so there is no visual frame of reference. You always find music playing here through many different kinds of tube and solid state gear. On the day this picture was taken, the mighty VR-10s were holding court.

Brian is bringing another load of our drivers into the loading dock. Since we build everything in house, we maintain a large inventory of component parts and receive shipments every week. Maintaining a large inventory enables us to sort, test and reject any parts that do not meet our standards.

Adjacent to our assembly area is our own wood shop and paint booth. Here Tim is using one of our inverted pin routers to shape a VR-3 front baffle. The large inflated bag in the background is part of our saw dust collection system.

Here’s another shot of the wood shop with Cortland working at one of the cabinet assembly benches. You can see two air hoses coming down from the ceiling. These pressure lines are found throughout the wood shop and production area. In the wood shop they use them for the pneumatic nail guns. In the production area they use the compressed air to blow clean the wood surfaces and the grill cloth during final assembly.

Our crossover assembly room is the home of Tweety, Shirleen and Kathy. We don’t want to appear sexist, but we think that the ladies have an edge when it comes to meticulous soldering. All of our crossovers are hand soldered point-to-point. Printed circuit boards may look nicer and appear to be more "high-tech," but they don’t sound as good. We keep the signal path as short as possible and use silver solder to connect the parts leads one to another. The Winslow coils we use on the bass crossovers (pictured here) have a 1500 watt saturation point.

Paul is preparing a crossover board to go inside the VR-4 bass module. We use "liquid nails" and wood screws to attach them to the bottom rear of the module. That way, they won’t come loose even if the "American Tourister Gorillas" deliver your speakers. We also carefully orient our coils so that they won’t interfere with each other or be effected by the field radiating from the speaker magnet.

Back to the wood shop with Cortland lining up the dowels on a VR-3 speaker cabinet.
You can see the mounting hole for the rear ambient driver and some of the internal bracing that is used in the bass chamber.

Dave is completing work on the midrange and treble assembly on a VR-3 speaker. It
takes a lot of extra work to create minimum baffle, phase aligned enclosures, but they are essential to the VR sound.

The VR-4 M/T modules are lined up in the production area for final assembly and grill sock installation. We are currently using about 13,000 sq. feet for production and have plenty of room for expansion. Even with the unprecedented popularity of our speakers, we’ve been able to keep production in pace with demand. You needn’t worry about two or three month back-orders with VR. Our team will do what it takes to keep our quality high and our dealers supplied.

After assembly and burn-in, Damon Von Schweikert rolls the loudspeakers one at a time into the test room. Damon’s "love shack," as we like to call it, is an acoustically isolated room where final system tests are performed.

This shot, inside the "love shack" shows a VR-3 being put through its paces. Full frequency sweeps and FFT analysis are used to insure that each loudspeaker performs up to the standard set by our reference models.

Shirleen came up for air from the crossover room and is helping out with packaging. Even our packing material is carefully engineered with those "American Tourister Gorillas" in mind.

Damon and Warren load them up for delivery to your dealer. Does one of these boxes have your name on it? If you want the best value in a high performance loudspeaker, it should.