New Gallo 3.5's

By really high volume levels I mean something like 50 to 100 W per channel. In other words not deafening but just realistic sound levels. I don't think I'm exceeding 90-95 db in my large room.

I also would not want my comments to be construed as any kind of indictment of the speaker. I think that this is clearly the best speaker for the money, and probably the best speaker for under $6000 easily. I think it's actually a better speaker than the $8000 B. and W. 800 diamond series floor stander (forgotten the model number). in fact I think the speaker might be the best value in high end audio but that does not mean that it can't be improved. A more aesthetic solution would be to apply dampening compounds to the interior of the frame but I suspect Gallo has already done something like that because certainly the frame does not resonate the way untreated metal might.in any case, I'm happy with my results, and so are you!

Curious what your general impression of the Gallo amp is? do you have it connected from speaker level or line level inputs? Can you tell the difference on classical music and popular music? The speakers already have pretty good bass but I have been thinking seriously about buying the amp. any recommendations or cautions would be appreciated.

Best, Doug

Given my 12 wpc SET monoblocks, it would be kinda hard to experience 50-100 watt levels :-)

I'm filling a pretty big space with these SETS, BTW, (18 x 40' with an "L" off one of the 40' sides) and never experienced strain or clipping, probably because of their humongous transformers. As to the Gallo sub amp, I'm of two minds. Yes, it does add heft to the bottom end (I'm bringing it in at around 45 hz), but I've never heard anything to complain about down there with or without the bass amp (one recent visitor actually asked me where the subwoofer was), and I'm not really a bass freak. If you're interested, I'd suggest picking up a used one at ~$450 so you can flip it if you don't like it.

I'm using the line level inputs -- my amps complain loudly if I try to use the speaker-level ones. Good luck, Dave

Dfwatt, Read this interview with Mr. Gallo. May give you a little more insight. http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/gallo09/opt.html

Thanks very much for that link. I think I might've scanned that piece earlier, but now I read it more carefully. I certainly think Gallo is on the right track and I agree with everything that he says. I did not know he was absorbing so many extra costs in order to maintain the price point of the original Reference Threes and 3.1. It makes sense unfortunately that the speaker cost has virtually doubled. He clearly is a gifted designer and very thoughtful about design targets.

I do have some major questions though about the widespread assumption that absolute phase integrity (a virtually physically impossible design target in a discrete three-way system except perhaps in a tiny listening window) is nearly as important to the audible illusion of a music source compared to flat frequency response and some other things. In sources that are time coherent but not time aligned (such as newer BMW and KEF designs) the amount of delay between the arrival times of wave fronts coming from woofer versus mid range versus tweeter is on the order of 1 to 3 ms or so. Although virtually everyone would agree that it is theoretically desirable to have complete phase integrity, I don't believe anyone has demonstrated in double blind testing that a 1 to 3 ms phase smear is really truly audible. What is clearly audible on the other hand are things like transient response, and frequency response and intermodular distortion (many times more audible than classic harmonic distortion). Additionally, designs that prioritize phase alignment have to make sacrifices in other things that are audible (read the excellent Stereophile review of one of Thiel's speakers at http://stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1208thi/.

There is pretty good physical evidence that transient response and these other things are intrinsically related, in other words that great transient response predicts a flat frequency response and even a good phase response and relatively low IM distortion.

I think human beings are great at constructing plausible story-lines to explain something, but many of our plausible stories turn out not to be true. Science is literally littered with the corpses of dead highly plausible theories and we still have to test even our favorite ideas that seem totally commonsensical against some kind of empirical prediction. I have not seen a truly careful test double blinded of phase smear at very small time frames (have enough literature in my own area to review and stay on top of).

Part of the reason I'm skeptical is that I don't think there's much reason why evolution would've carved the ability to detect these things because they have very little application in the real world to basic mammalian survival tasks. Unless phase smear at very small time scales meant that we could not identify either the spatial location or the source of a noise (and these are clearly unaffected), is not clear to me that there would be any selection process for such abilities. I honestly don't know what the work is in this area, and I'm sure that phase smear becomes audible at some point (my guess is somewhere probably around 100 to 200 ms). But I believe that very few speakers have that degree of phase delay. Thiel has made a killing selling the idea that extremely small phase delays or mismatches make a big audible difference, and although I have considerable respect for his speakers and for him personally, I don't agree that there is compelling evidence for such an assumption. Of course it's possible that some people's brains can hear small degrees of phase misalignment while other people cannot.

Anybody know of any carefully done research in psychoacoustics to address this question? I'd be interested.

best, Doug

DFWATT said "By really high volume levels I mean something like 50 to 100 W per channel. In other words not deafening but just realistic sound levels. I don't think I'm exceeding 90-95 db in my large room."

Hi Doug, how do you know how many watts or how loud you are listening? Does you amp have meters? What SPL meter do you use?

I know people are touchy around here so being gentle, how do you know this? Just asking....

Bob