Anyone hear/purchase GMA Continuum 3's?

I own them and I think they are amazing.........capable of competing with almost any speaker at any price. As a biased informant (any owner is), here's an angle you might appreciate. Every person who has been over my house to listen to them is interested in purchasing them ;)

Roy makes amazing speakers. His Europa's are unfreaking believable for their askig price!

I have also been considering getting the G.M.A 3 but so far no one has been able to state why these speakers are so AMAZING! There are other speakers out there that cost less money, go lower in the bass, and look better also. Look at the new Von Schwiekert 4 Jr. Choice of wood cabinets, goes to 23hz and is $2700.00 less retail to start with compared to the $6700.00 for the Continuum 3. I have read were the Europa out performs its cost, does the Continuum 3 share this also? How have they improved the 3 over the Continuum 2?

Tweety, you shouldnt buy speakers based on specs. I have had speakers in my room that were rated down to 16 or 18Hz and the C3's clearly outperform them in the bass dept.

What makes them special? They are the most coherant 3 way I have ever heard. Their spatial presentation is above reproach, they sound great at any volume setting (low and very high), and they allow you to enjoy your entire library, not just the "audiophile quality CD's. Similar to the Europa's, the C3's can compete with other speakers costing MUCH more.

Thank you Dolphin, will still consider the 3 at the top of my list. This will be my last speaker and want to make sure it performs well in all areas.

Tweety,

As a GMA C1.5i owner I can help a little to answer your questions:

In general, the speaker design philosophy @ GMA is to design a speaker that intrudes the very least on the music playing. Roy determined that the best way to do so was to add as little phase shift to the speaker as possible hence he settled on a 1st-order xover circuit. As know, phase & frequency are inextricably linked - if there is a blip in the freq. response, there will be a phase implication & vice-versa. 1st-order xover circuits have a very gentle roll-off hence they intrude the very least into the freq. band of interest thereby they least screw-up the response in the said freq. band. The disadvantage of 1st-order xover circuits is that drivers are not as well protected from each other i.e. some woofer signal leaks into the mid, some mid signal leaks into the tweeter & these type of speakers cannot play as loud as some speakers of the same physical size. However, in all the speakers Roy has designed presently, the phase shift from 300Hz to 8KHz is less than 1 degree! Do some research & look @ specs of many, many other speakers & see what their phase shift is in this freq. range. You will notice that these other speakers' phase shift is all over the map in the 300Hz - 8KHz region. Aside from this, Roy has figured out how his xover circuits can provide a constant impedance to the amplifier using the correct topology Zobel circuits. This makes the speaker a very easy load to drive hence virtually any amplifier can be used & will sound good with his speakers.
Roy also has chosen drivers that are very linear in their resp. freq. ranges of operation. This means that each driver holds its own (i.e. is moving pistonically) before it gets crossed over. Thus, there is minimal distortion from the driver while it is actively reproducing music.
All these aspects (notably minimal phase shift) help to create a speaker that is very true to the recorded music. The timbral accuracy is very high & one always gets a feeling of the performer being in one's room. Thus, customers always feel that the speaker far out does is asking price.
Hope that this helps. FWIW. IMHO.
FYI: I am merely a satisfied customer. I do not represent GMA in any form or fashion. I know what I wrote only because I did extensive research on GMA speakers before buying it. I am also trained as an EE so many concepts of speaker design & acoustics are well within my grasp.