A few questions for Green Mountain Europa owners

Thanks for the comments and compliments guys!

Lou- the parts we use are stated on our miniscule website, and as Tennis Junky said- an Aurasound woofer (not fancy looking- resembles an old ADS woofer), a Morel dome, a SonicCap capacitor for the tweeter and a Solen Litz-wire inductor for the woofer. There are a couple of high-voltage Solens in the drivers' voice-coil Zobel networks. That's it. And yes- resistors are high-power, non-inductive wirewounds in ceramic blocks.

These parts produce the best sound for our purposes. We have tried all the other parts you mentioned and more. While excellent choices, they had sonic flavors I could not balance against the rest of the variables in the Europa. We also keep listening, to take advantage of "better" parts asap.

Thanks again for all the feedback. Keep on listening!

Best regards,
Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio

PS:
Lou- the "ultimate SPL" really depends on the music. At ten feet away, on highly compressed rock, you would not want to exceed ~98dB (midband energies) on an average-reading SPL meter like Radio Shack's- so you don't burn them up.

Yet on the very best recordings, we have measured 105dB+ peak SPL on voice, piano, horns, snare drum whacks, picked notes on electric guitar and banjo, on decent peak-storing digital SPL meters. This was at 11-12 feet away in stereo, right at the transition from nearfield to farfield acoustics, in a moderately-dead room with a 9 foot suspended ceiling and cement slab floor under office carpet.

There was no apparent distortion, time and again, with professional classical musicians listening. Since our altitude is 6500 feet, that 105+dB becomes 108+dB at sea level. We also also talking about these peaks as being brief flickers of un-clipped, non-slew-rate-limited high power, and not the sustained notes from electric-guitar solos. We need 200W+ (8 Ohms) here to safely do this, and so at sea level, that would be an amp with 120W/channel (8 Ohm rating)- the Europa is a 4 Ohm speaker. And if you do that all afternoon- you'll soon need new tweeter diaphragms.
Of course, race your sports car- you'll buy new tires and race again!

Am I advocating high power for the Europas? No- just telling you the benefits. I have been plenty pleased spending most of the time well under 20W (8 Ohm) peak- as do most owners.

The point is to make a speaker that can deal with any music you want to play, with any recording quality, and which works well with most any electronics without exaggerating (distorting) their distortions.

Thanks for the comments guys!

M2500tvr- contact me about your layout, or request a new copy via e-mail of the Europa manual. The speakers are too far apart, unless there is something about your room we should discuss (I know we've spoken). Try the "equal-legged Tee" layout (10% narrower than an equilateral triangle) discussed in the manual. Then listen to audience applause to hear the most time-coherent axis. It ranges from being at ~the dome tweeter's down to the woofer's center, depending on how close you sit. This is in the manual, and we are urging all owners to contact us for the latest manual, to make sure they have no typos in theirs for this listening height. But the audience-applause test is best (quickest), as applause is half woofer/half tweeter. When the two drivers come into minimum phase, you can easily hear fat hands, flat hands, small hands, cupped hands... Crosby, Stills, N, Y "Four-way Street", "Jazz at the Pawn Shop", Patricia Barber "Companion (?)- her live album". Close your eyes and remove eyeglasses to hear this the clearest.

I am getting much more low end, and more accurate low end, with some new interconnects that have finally reached 400 hours. Didn't think it would be possible to get substantially better bass from Europas, after trying more equipment and cables and sources and recordings than you care to count.

Keep in touch! Thanks again to everyone for their kind comments.

Best,
Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio

PS: Lou, we did try the best Mills resistors in place of the wirewounds we use, and the sound was just noticably less grainy, a little more precise- on any equipment.
However, the increased costs of inventory would have driven up the price of the limited number of Europas we can make each year. We need to stock more than 100 each in 40 values, to have enough every month to match into pairs. You'd have to hear the difference side-by-side to tell. It is not a jump up & down thing.

Lou, by "OEM resistors", do you mean the unbranded ones from overseas- ewww... no way. We know who makes ours, and for how long they have, and what their tolerances are year after year, and the materials used. They are quite good.

It's not surprising you've heard differences in resistors, and the amount of difference depends, as you'd expect, on where they are used (amp, speaker, etc) and how employed, as well as how they are made/who makes them.

Hopefully, we'll see more advances in low-noise, high-power audio resistors, in the same manner as capacitors have evolved. The ones in flat-packs requiring heatsinks are not worth the extra cost for our simple crossovers, but, cost be damned- I'll likely be working with them on our flagship unless I can eliminate the need for them.

Thanks Phasecorrect-
I must point that we hear the Europas reveal poor cables (interconnects), which too often make a sound (a grunge if you will) all of us interpret as poor recordings or poor CD players. With the finer interconnects, you would hear that the Europas are not too hard at all on poor recordings. Even while using $1/foot 12ga speaker wire.

Poor cables we find, also color our judgement of exactly how quick and clean and subtle any amplifier is.

Please note that the 8-10 feet is wrong, as Europas can be enjoyed fully at 5 feet away (ear level = woofer center) to as far away as 30+ feet (ear level = slightly above tweeter's dome). One could also tilt them back/forth a little to fine tune. Use audience applause as the fastest/first test.

This info on ear height vs. speaker height is in our manuals (Phasecorrect- if you need a new copy, just holler).

Any 10-12foot rating applies only to 3-way first-order speakers (if the drivers are fixed in position), as that is probably a designer's focal point for average rooms for sofa height... You cannot raise or tilt that cabinet to make those three+ fixed drivers all lie upon another, different radius arc. We can however, can come close enough when moving/adjusting a two-way.

Best regards and happy holidays,
Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio