[Russell Dawkins]

Pretty spectacular project!! Amazingly ambitious.

Since you consider dispersion characteristics very carefully, I can only suppose you would also be considering time alignment just as carefully, or do you consider that unimportant?

I ask because unless you are delaying the mid domes and tweeter in the crossover it looks as though they lead the mid range drivers in the waveguides by a significant amount, not to speak of the bass drivers further yet behind.

[Snickers-is]

"Double Ugly": The characteristics of the speakers are pretty boreing from a listeners point of view. They only control the technical aspect of sound reproduction, but without any digital correction they sound like crap. That means, when the correction is set up you can add any taste parameter you want in order to get the system to sound the way you want it to. You can also set up different sounds in the presets.

"arthurs": The price tag is about US$ 90 000 including set up, power amps, digital correction and the speakers. The price will depend on design options.

"Russel Dawkins": I consider the dispersion pattern more important than the phase/time alignment, but that does not mean I consider phase time alignment unimportant. It is pretty amazing to hear how bad one can correct the system, and it still performs far better than a traditional system would have performed in the same room.

All the drivers are digitally time aligned, and also phase corrected through their working range.

[mcullinan]

Thats $90 dollars? Quite a bargain! What are those 3 extra 0s there for... just being friendly with the 90 dollars i guess. Thats nice.
Mike

[Snickers-is]

Are you trying to tell me that you think the system is interesting, but you do not have the money at the moment? 

[mcullinan]

No it looks rediculously beautiful! Amazing accomplishment! Now I just have to save my lunch money until Im one of those heads in the jars like on Futurama..... then spring for them.
Mike

[woodsyi]

They look gorgeous even in what I would call a faintly pukish green.  I suppose you could call it avocado if you want to be chic.   I would definitely pick another color but that's a moot point.  I am not worthy of the speakers -- they are way out of my league in terms of price.  

[Snickers-is]

The colour was actually meant to be a lot darker and "less green" than it appears on the images. However, given the time we had before this audition we only had two layers of paint to test with in order to not get a sticky wet or soft paint. The colour will be changes to a colour closer to black with less green saturation. The glass fixing points will be black anodized.

I am working on a second set of Gaia. They will be more brown and less red in their wood. The aluminium parts will be silver anodized and the front horn will be pure black or a very dark gray.

There are pretty much no limitations to what can be done to colour, material and surface finish on these speakers. You can make an all Ferrari red version, a pearl white/silver, an all black piano and so on. It is also possible to do design tweaks like different enclosure contour, spacers between the parts, lifted foot, no end protection on the glasses, art type glasses, hand painted graphic, leather covered parts, Corian parts, stone parts... well, fantasy is pretty much the only limitation.

[Imperial]

I was at the demo, heard these "bad boys" in action, and I was very impressed.
I can vouch for that they are indeed a most impressive achievement.
And yes, despite their size, they sounded very focused and with great freedom from the cabinets!

The dispersion obviously works! Sitting down, standing up, walking back and forth in front of them.
Not much change to the sound at all.

Imperial

[Snickers-is]

Regarding the price I need to point out that since the USD currency is extremely low at the moment, and since the price tag was calculated based on a much higher USD value, we need to recalculate the price for new enquiries. We will calculate a new price when USD seems to have obtained stability again.

[Snickers-is]

And finally, the speakers meet their new owner. This is what they look like after we changed the colour of the front horn assembly:







We now got the opportunity to really AB-test hybrid dipole against normal closed cabinet, both with the same frequency response but very different transient response. The difference is as audible as the difference between a dipole and a normal speaker but the LF extension is clearly better than any dipole of similar size, while the frequency response is extremely smooth and the attack at any frequency hits the entire body with the same amount of energy (which is very uncommon especially for normal dispersion speakers).

It also became obvious that using the correct Hybrid Dipole settings is extremely important. It was easy to tune the bass section to perform worse than closed cabinet configuration. Without hybrid dipole we got 2-3 room modes, but not very bad ones. Using wrong Hybrid Dipole settings moved the modes and in some cases made them worse. When hitting the right setting the modes were actually wiped out. Setting up the speakers in the best possible position from the beginning also paid off. Hybrid Dipole is no total replacement for a really bad room. It just adds a certain amount of quality to the system in a normal room. Playing with Hybrid Dipole reminded me of the sound you can achieve with correct use of Helmholtz resonators and bass traps together with high quality speakers. The ability to remove room modes is limited so with just a few modes you can get a near perfect performance.

[Snickers-is]

Since my last posting, some racks and details are now in place. Secondly, what obviously does not show on the image, the system has been tuned further. Because of the limitations in the number of parametric EQ bands in the DEQX, a matrix processor will be installed (in addition to the DEQX) to give some more flexibility and control over the subwoofer drivers.

Here the proud owner in deep concentration listening to one of his old favourites; Back Door:

[Snickers-is]

A year has passed since the speakers were assembled on site, and recently I did a round of measurements with Clio. I found some points for potential improvement, and after several hours of fine tweaking the result turned out even better than before. However, with the level of potential improvements in a system like this the next obvious step is to make a completely new digital processor.

I also brought my camera, again

[Snickers-is]

A review in the Norwegian Fidelity Magazine is now available for free download:

http://audiofidelity.no/comlete_mags/Fidelity41.pdf

The test starts on page 92.

I have tried to translate the conclusion:
"Gaia is one of the best loudspeaker systems I have ever heard, regardless of price. I have a full range system with room correction too, and I know how difficult it is to get a large speaker to perform homogeneous when you are playing very loud in a normal living room. Gaia does just that with bravura and incomparable finesse. Hopefully, the technology from Gaia will be used in downscaled models from Midgard Audio."

[jtwrace]

That room sure could use some acoustic treatments...

[Snickers-is]

Yes, we have talked about it, but then again, every time I listen to it, I just forget that the systems is in a room that normally would not work very well. One thing is to calculate the theory that tells us this will work. Another thing is to experience it.

We will try some acoustic treatment in the near future.