Richard Vandersteen spent the 1980s and '90s proving that you didn't need massive floorstanding speakers to disappear into a room. The 2Ce Signature, introduced in 2003, is the culmination of that philosophy—a compact two-way design that sits between the affordable 2A and the more ambitious 3A, and it's the sweet spot most people should have bought instead of whatever they actually brought home.
The original 2C arrived in 1986 and became a cult object among people who actually listened to music rather than looked at catalogs. By 2003, when the Signature revision landed, Vandersteen had refined the tweeter mounting, tightened the crossover tolerances, and improved the cabinet bracing without changing the essential footprint. The speaker still measures just 8 inches wide and stands 37 inches tall—narrow enough to live between a window and a bookshelf, substantial enough that you're not fooling yourself about what you're hearing.
What you're hearing is controlled, articulate, and musical. The 2Ce Signature doesn't play the volume game or pretend to have bass it doesn't possess. The 6.5-inch woofer goes down to about 40 Hz in a room, which means you're relying on the acoustics to fill the bottom octave. That's not a flaw—it's a design choice. What it buys you is speed and coherence across the midrange and treble that most compact speakers butcher in the name of "presence." The tweeter alignment on the Signature is recessed slightly, which Vandersteen calls "first-order" integration but what you'll hear as vocals and cymbals appearing slightly behind the plane of the speakers instead of jumping at your face. This sounds more like a live recording than a PA system turned up in your den.
The real magic lives in the imaging. Stereo separation is extraordinary for a speaker this size, and soundstage depth is better than speakers twice the price. You'll hear the back wall of an Abbey Road session studio, the hand-claps at the edge of a Miles Davis quintet take. This is what happens when a designer obsesses over phase coherence and crossover slope instead of chasing flatness in a soundproofed room.
The caveat: they're inefficient. At 87 dB/watt, they need real amplification. A 40-watt integrated amp is the minimum; 60 watts and up is where they start to breathe. If you're running them off a Linn Majik or a Naim Nait, you're golden. If your amp is a vintage receiver with a fried phono stage and 25 watts of dust-covered output, the Vandersteens will sound polite and small. That's not their fault.
Finding a pair in 2024 means hunting used—production numbers were never huge, and the Signature has aged beautifully. They're not flashy. They don't Instagram well. But they're still doing what Vandersteen intended: disappearing into the room and letting you hear the records.