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Green Mountain Audio Chroma HX

Hi, Folks,
Do any of you have any experience with the latest iteration of Roy Johnson's Green Mountain Audio Rio stand mount? He's upgraded the crossover and internal wiring, and it's now called the Chroma HX.
Any impressions?
Thanks!

rebbi
golferscochran
4 posts
 
I just upgraded from the chroma 2 to the HX version of the GMA RIO . The results were amazing!! much better cohesion across the frequency spectrum . The detail was also improved. I have owned many highly rated speakers and none of them come close to the overall musicality of the RIO HX.                                                                                                                   

Retired AT&T Senior engineer                                                                                 

Steven Cochran


















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kenjit
1,771 posts
 
Yes I have owned chromas and I hated them. They are colored, have no bass or midbass and are harsh and unrefined. 

I have also taken them apart so I know exactly why they sound like this. 

They use a very cheap aurasound car woofer instead of a state of the art midwoofer from the likes of Scanspeak. 

They use a very cheap Seas tweeter. 

Now what's even worse is they use a single cap and coil as the crossover. Inexpensive ones at that, costing about $20 each.

The capacitor cannot prevent low frequencies from entering into the tweeter. Take a 10Uf cap and stick it on a woofer and see how far the woofer cone moves. This is the energy going into that SEAS  tweeter. Put your finger on the tweeter of the Rio and you can even feel the energy! Do it on any other high quality speaker and you wont feel a thing because they use a sharper order crossover slops which are much more phase cohesive. All that distortion makes the sound very harsh and cold.

Now, similarly the woofer has too much highs going into it and also what you get is lobing. With the Rios you have to be sat on the exact spot. If you stand up or sit lower the sound balance changes.

The cabinet of the rio is much smaller than it looks because the walls are too thick. The woofer sits in a thick baffle with no chamfering and the woofer actually needs a bigger volume which is why there's no bass.

Overall it's very overpriced considering the parts they use. If you like their sound, great. If you want high quality neutral uncolored sound look elsewhere.

 

dbb
198 posts
 
I strongly disagree with the negative comments on the Chromas. Overall, these speakers have a very natural musical sound. They are for music lovers.

I recently had Gallo Strada 2s for a home trial. With a subwoofer they are comparable in price to the Chromas.  The Gallos' are impressive speakers in terms of dynamics, resolution, and sound stage, but not even close to the musicality, imaging, and over all listenablity of the Chromas. I used the Gallo subwoofer with both the Chromas and the Strada 2s

As far as the parts, the Chromas use Seas 29TTFF/W tweeters. They are fine sounding 6 ohm tweeters. I have a pair of the Seas Excell Millennium tweeters, the companies finest from a speaker kit project. The specs are similiar. They cost about $305 each. I swaped the Millenniums in to the Chromas. Yes the sound did improve, but by a small margin. Arguably not worth the increased cost. 

My conclusion is that the Chromas are brilliantly designed to get maximum bang for the parts used. Better parts yield only marginal improvement.


kenjit
1,771 posts
 
@dbb

Interesting that your Green Mountain Audio Chromas use Seas 29TTFF/W tweeters.

Mine uses the seas H1462-06 27TDFNC/GW.

Have you tried swapping out the woofer or modifying the crossover?

Despite the usual rule that ferro fluid damped tweeters dont need impedance compensation I do not agree that it applies to this tweeter. You can hear and feel the amount of energy coming through by touching the tweeter dome.

The only way to improve this speaker is by replacing that woofer in there. It’s not just that it's low quality, it’s not designed to work in small boxes like the chroma.

That’s why youre not getting any decent bass weight out of these speakers.
audiokinesis
2,747 posts
 

"I just upgraded from the chroma 2 to the HX version of the GMA RIO . The results were amazing!! much better cohesion across the frequency spectrum . The detail was also improved. I have owned many highly rated speakers and none of them come close to the overall musicality of the RIO HX." - Steven Cochran

"...these speakers have a very natural musical sound. They are for music lovers." - dbb

"Yes I have owned chromas and I hated them." - kenjit

Hmmm.

Kenjit, can you describe your room and amplifier? Assuming dbb and Mr. Cochran are not deaf, it is possible that there is a serious problem elsewhere in your system that you are mistakenly attributing to the Chromas.

"Do it on any other high quality speaker and you wont feel a thing because they use a sharper order crossover slops which are much more phase cohesive."

Sharper crossover slopes are NOT "much more phase cohesive". The fact that a steeper crossover can be in-phase at the crossover point does not make the system itself more "phase cohesive" across its passband. And the "phase coherence" that is claimed by everyone and his brother originates in the marketing department: Almost always such designs have either 180 degrees of phase shift with the tweeter’s polarity inverted to put it back "in phase" at the crossover point (but not elsewhere), OR 360 degrees of phase shift which puts the drivers back "in phase" at the crossover point (but not elsewhere) while the woofer lags the tweeter by one cycle, which is hardly "phase coherence".

Duke

dealer/manufacturer/competes against Green Mountain Audio

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