I am very happy with the Aperions I bought about 15 months ago.  The only speaker that I feel is a compromise is the 533 center channel.  On some voices, like the main character in House, I could use deeper bass.  And I find the highest tones a bit irritating.  Looks like these are the 2 areas you tried to improve with the replacement 5C.  I know I could buy one on your 30 day trial, but I thought I would ask...... how confident are you that the improvement is significant enough that the average guy can hear it.  I hate to waste everyone's effort, time and money if the difference isn't significant.

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Well for someone like yourself that has our previous generation speakers for your front left and rights, it's advisable to stick with the 533-VAC since it uses the same tweeter and woofers as your fronts and will give you the most seamless sound stage for your front array. 

If you have it crossed over at 80 Hz currently you could give 70 a shot, looking at the graph it's frequency response at 70 Hz is about -10 dB so it's not going to hit the lower frequencies with authority but it won't harm the speaker to try it. 

For what it's worth I did a brief comparison of the 533-VAC and the 5C a while back and these were my thoughts:

I finally got a chance to do a little A/B action for the 5C and 533-VAC, and while the difference wasn't quite as dramatic [as the difference between the 5B and 532], the 5C had more defined bass, the mids were slightly more upfront for more acoustic types of music and in general it had a more open sound.  Without a doubt the 5C is accomplishing its main purpose, serving as a perfect compliment to the 5Bs and 5Ts.

Hope that helps!
 

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Jason Hicks
Aperion Audio Guru

Hi,

 I was always happy with my 533-Vac's performance and never felt like it came up short for me on any programming so, when I read your post, I pulled it upstairs and did a head to head comparison between it and the 5C already in place. I used last night's episode of House to compare Hugh Laurie's voice on both speakers. For me, the difference was slim. The 5C has a bit more bass, but I didn't feel like it added any meat to Hugh's voice in that case. It makes me wonder if perhaps it is the micing and recording of dialogue on that show or if it might be an EQ setting you could "undo" in your receiver. HA, that's my M.O.- defeater of EQ's everywhere ;-)

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Caleb Denison