Warmest sounding Green Mountain speaker?

I havent heard the bigger GMAs but the bookshelf models I have heard are clearly flawed in the bass region IMO. The mid-upper bass which gives an acoustic instruments its woodiness character and to some extent the body was lacking seriously IMO. I have heard it with at least 4 different sources, 5 different amps and a similar number of cable iterations and nothing did anything to change my opinion. If you want me to believe that all the equipments were flawed and only the speaker was truthful (because it can be explained through Physics), hmmmmm you very well know what my reply would be. Moreover it is not all that difficult to identify the characteristic sound of a speaker, at least the fundamentals come through pretty early. What I guessed about GMA on my first audition remains true even today, say after 20th audition.

Having said that I am pretty aware of what "revealing" speakers do and sound like. I have owned some studio monitors from Dynaudio Acoustics in the past and currently use ATC at home. In my experience, just showing up differences in cables or an isolation device is just the beginning of the "revealing" chapter. There is lot more to it. Nowadays even a $500 speaker can easily show differences between cables !! Not a big deal in my books. I know GMAs are better than that but saying that they dont have very little signature sound and all they do is show up the rest of the chain is an extraordinarily exaggerated overstatement IMO.

Pani,

To each his own is all I can say. I have heard the Callistos, the Europas, the Imagos, C3s and C3 HDs and I don't hear anything like what you describe.

Disclosure: I sell 'em, Departure Audio.

All GMA speakers are voiced the same way, i.e. to be neutral, natural sounding and accurate. I have never found "dry" "bright" "warm" "cold" "woody" etc. to apply to these speakers. They all adhere to a few simple design principles:

- time and phase coherence
- simple, simple first order crossover
- dead cabinet (cast marble)
- wide bandwidth drivers
- good sensitivity

To my knowledge, only Vandersteen and Theil are taking time coherence in speaker design as seriously as GMA. They both use much more complex crossovers which, to my ears, choke some of the life out of the music.

Most (not all) people who seriously audition GMA speakers experience a bit of a revelation as they hear the real benefits of time coherence for the first time, benefits that make the music so much more alive sounding.

IMHO.

You said it better than I could have. But you are right, the music is more alive. That's a very good way to say it.

Shakey

I've only heard GMA's top Calypso HD in an unlikely pairing with Cary 2A3SE SET monoblocks. Up to a moderate volume this combo was transparent across FR with well delineated LF. Excellent build quality and price/performance. At the demo I swapped in a 100wpc Acurus amp on hand and LF took on more authority-- sounding far better than one would expect from this budget Mondial SS amp.