I haven't seen any amplitude-vs-angle tests of the two speakers, but what I can say is that the VP180 seems to deliver a sufficiently wide "bubble of sound" that off-axis listeners seem to be very well covered.

Unless you plan to play at fairly low sound levels I would be tempted to stay with VP180 simply from an ability-to-be-loud-and-clean perspective. There are a fair number of movie mixes where the center channel gets as much content as the mains or even a bit more, so I see the VP180 as the perfect match for my M80 mains.

The one odd thing I noticed is that the cabinet/port tuning on the VP160 seems to give a more gentle roll-off at low frequencies, so if you are running with a very low crossover frequency to the sub the 160 *might* be desirable.

Take that with a grain of salt though, this is just a quick observation while checking the 160/180 specs to see if the measurements included a polar response graph.

Last edited by bridgman; 01/16/17 04:29 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8