Anyone hear/purchase GMA Continuum 3's?

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.

Well said Bombaywalla! By the way.. that was a nice review of the C1.5i...I really enjoyed reading it.

Happy Holidays!

I live near Roy in central Colorado and had the pleasure of auditioning the Europas at the factory...a less than impressive place...if anything other than sound production and Roy's enthusiasm counts. Roy's shop has the feel of a mad scientists laboratory with Roy being the maestro of musical mysticism. I had planned to audition the new C-3's but none were finished, so I spent about 3 hours listening to a wide variety of music that Roy selected to demonstrate the Europas. I had brought some of my own (featuring female voices like Diana Krall and old jazzy Joni Mitchell) some old King Crimson, Sprit, Led Zep; a classical piece or two...none of what I brought challenged the Europas at all. Roy kept telling me that one of the finer attributes of the Europas was their ability to make bad recordings or pressings, or CD's ...sound great...and proceeded to demonstrate how true this was...

All the while offering explanations about first order crossovers that quite frankly left me befuddled...but I'm not nearly as interested in them as Roy is...I just want to listen...my ears make me a believer. And believe...I did.

Roy played some of the most obscure recordings, many by artists I'd never heard of...and in spite of some obvious recording flaws...the europas made everything highly listenable...which explains my staying there 3 hours.

I kept thinking, these sound better that XXX, or YYY, or ZZZ, but they lack something....but could never pin it down. And considering the speakers I was comparing these little $880.00 / pr marvels to, cost 3-4 times as much, I can say that this is one of the better audio buys around at this time. (One of the sets I own already, retail <$3,000.00 per pair and I will be hard pressed to encourage someone to buy them now...even though I'll take a huge loss if I can't)

I had planned to purchase the C-3's at tax return time 2004...but since my first ex-wife twisted the knife of past due child support (her and her attorney's contention) I'll have to wait till next yeat....but that's OK...I'll be happy with the Europas until then...just asked Roy to put a pair of Europas together for me...Undoubtedly one of my more rational hi-fi purchases this decade.

Buy a pair...and listen like Thieves.

Something I left out in my diatribe re: the Europas, when comparing them not only to speakers I own, but those I've been "told" were among the best...what the Eupopas were missing was a haze...a veil between me and the music.

They were transparent...and sounded much larger than their diminuative size should be able to. The cabinets are so dense that rapping on them just hurts...dull as a...well stone...cause that's what they are...

I could go on, but if you decide to get a pair...if you don't like them you can sell them on Audiogon...they rarely last long....if you see them at all.

BTW, don't work for Roy....work for a Financial institution in the area.