Warmest sounding Green Mountain speaker?

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.

First order cross over, Time Alignment, Phase Alignment are all very good things and I agree GMAs do it well. But I dont listen to them individually, it comes as part of music, if piano sounds like an instrument which is just 2ft long and 2ft wide and made of some thing rigid like Aluminium then I get definitely get turned off in spite of all the time/phase coherence etc.