Janszen Loudspeaker Valentina A8 Active

For sale are a very good condition set of Janszen Valentina A8 Active hybrid electrostatic speakers gently used in my professional audio mastering studio. These are the most recent updated version of Valentina Actives with dual 8-inch woofers and the improved dual 500 watt class-d amplification. Speakers are in perfect working condition and are available for pickup in St Louis, MO or ship in original factory boxes.


From Janszen :

Introduced just this year along with a new passive version, the Valentina A8 is a substantial upgrade to the original Valentina Active. I you've read or heard the original, you can add deeper bass, stronger impact, louder playback, sharper imaging, and wider soundstaging, not to mention greater functionality, a remote control, digital and analog inputs, and two new options.

This active version, the Valentina A8, is the JansZen way of streamlining your high end system without compromise. You can eliminate most of the equipment stack and the speaker cables, thanks to:

built-in bi-amplification
built-in DAC
built-in preamplifier
automatic input selection
high input sensitivity
remote control for volume and other functions
In addition to streamlining your system, you get that famous JansZen electrostatic clarity and neutrality. And on top of that, there's bass depth and punch that's even better than from our passives, thanks to DSP.

These loudspeakers feature dual electrostatic panels with controlled dispersion that maximizes the proportion of direct sound and thus well conserves recorded ambiance and image detail. 8" woofers are arrayed above and below the panels, which creates a tall bass aperture that further minimizes floor and ceiling involvement.

The cabinets are sealed and compact, standing only about 40" [1m] high, yet they create a tall soundstage with deep bass and impact, all of which typically requires much larger speakers. The soundstage is also wide and deep, thanks to excellent phase reproduction and local room ambiance rejection.

Not being dipoles, they have no back wave, which makes them as easy to set up as ordinary speakers.

Their bass response is adjustable using the remote control to select between three presets. This is for compensating for the effect of the nearness of walls, namely near, mid, and far, but you can just use them for bass control, if you want.

The IR remote also controls volume, mute, input selection, and on/standby selection.

In the standard configuration, a conventional but high grade, wide-range silk ring-dome tweeter is mounted on the outboard side of each loudspeaker. These direct midrange and treble toward each near side wall, and can be continuously adjusted from off to quite loud. They're useful in two situations:

For critical listening to recordings that lack well recorded ambiance, turning them up just a bit helps restore the missing spaciousness.
When standing or listening from another room, turning them up higher supplies the treble that their controlled dispersion prevents from reaching much above seated height.
Since each is continuously adjustable, rooms with asymmetrical side wall distances can be easily accommodated.

With dual 500W/4Ω amplifiers in each cabinet, the A8 matches the dynamics of horns without the drawbacks, plus the unequaled transparency and neutrality of electrostatics.

The rear panel has five independent inputs that are auto-detecting, based on which is getting a signal:

Two analog
RCA single-ended
XLR balanced
Three digital
RCA S/PDIF
optical S/PDIF (TOSLINK)
XLR AES3 (balanced studio S/PDIF)
Consider how streamlined your system could be . . .

The preamp is built-in
The speakers can detect which input has an active source and automatically select it. The inputs can also be manually selected if desired using the remote. There's no need for a preamplifier's input selection function.
The inputs are sensitive enough that there's no need for preamplification.
Because of the remote, there's no need for a volume control.
The DAC is built-in
The digital inputs make an external DAC redundant.
You can go straight in from a streamer, transport, server, computer, Bluetooth receiver, etc..
With an adapter, you can run from a USB, split HDMI, or any other audio source.
A true high end system can be as simple as just a source and a pair of Valentina A8s. Of course, you can run an array of sources, too, without a preamp.