Journey ending speakers


Listening to to my  stereo last night thinking about what upgrade I may do in the future. May upgrade my CD player or change phono cart or a new arm? But one of the things I will never change is my speakers. My journey has ended with the speakers I have now. Are you like me and have your forever speakers? Oh mine are a set of 30 year old 4 way JBL  Studio Monitors 4345s.
ricpan
Old guy, moving from Wilson WP7's to Alexia Series 2. McIntosh system, tube power amp. Focal Utopia headphone rig. Grew up in house with one-off speakers built by Rudy Bozak, a friend of my father. Loved the BW speakers I have owned in the past.

Gentleman:

Don't forget the cabinet construction in your discussion. It is not just drivers that end up in the sound. I owned the Edgarhorn Titan horn system with Seismic Subwoofer for 13 years and it had very vintage drivers which I considered sublime to listen to with SET amplification. Those included the JBL 2441 in the midrange and Bruce's 300hz horn made of solid wood made it sing. The mid bass folded cabinet in mine and the seismic sub. also had JBL/Electrovoice vintage drivers but the cabinets were big and hard to properly brace. The only reason I sold the pair was due to the space in my room. These horns smoked a lot of others out there due to the driver chemistry/cabinet combination. My friends Avantgarde Trios with Bass Horns are hifi in comparison. Point is he likes what they do for him so he wins. I don't care to listen to them.

The Gamut speakers excel in sound not only due to quality timed drivers and crossovers but due to the 21 layers of "specific" Baltic wood used to make the cabinets in their top models. The layers are hand glued together. Why not 22 layers or 19? Because 21 sounded the best to the designer. 

A lot goes into the cabinet for the final result is my point. Drivers are only a part of the overall sound.

Gary (gwalt)

I grew up with the Bozak sound as I live in CT. I remember meeting him as a kid in one of the local stores.  The owners was close with him, but didn't sell his speakers.  I used to get to hear them all the time though as he was always bringing them in.  They'd call me to come listen after school (was on my way home).  What folks don't remember is that he designed and built the speakers for the NY Worlds Fair in the early 60's.  Pretty cool story.
I've heard an awful lot of speakers in my time, on account of they get sent to my shop for audition and I hear them at shows as well.

For about 20 years now one of the best I've heard has been the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-3.3, which is what I've been playing for most of that time (started as T-3s). They have dual 15" woofers (which cut off at 20Hz) and field-coil magnet structures. The midrange in particular is quite nice- beryllium compression diaphragm with a Kapton surround; very fast and the first breakup is at 35KHz, so very smooth as well. The speakers are also easy to drive, being 16 ohms and 98 db 1 watt/1 meter.   

There really isn't anything this speaker can't do. It can handle more power than I can throw at it, can play considerably louder than I ever need it to play and no part of the frequency spectrum is left to imagination. Its also very relaxed and detailed, even at high volume, but is equally comfortable imparting all the music at very low levels too. It is so undistorted that it is a bit disarming how loud its often playing- it certainly does not **sound** loud! Its only when you realized that you have to yell to be heard by someone right next to you that you realize how loud it might be playing.

Yet for all this the speaker is insanely musical. Its not particularly euphonic; instead I find it to be quite neutral, just like real music. It'll be quite a challenger to get them out of my living room- so far nothing is even on the horizon, which is not to say I've not heard other speakers that I could not live with for the rest of my life- I've heard a number of them. This one is simply the best of the crop.