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How do these cabinets compare structurally to your new bass towers? Do the Alon towers have passive drivers and is each active driver part of an independent enclosure within the whole?
Hard to say without having seeing the GR in person. The Alon bass towers are BIG... as in 84" tall x 13" wide x 26" deep. Weight is massive. If the VMPS RM/X (which I just packed up for ARAM) weigh 375 lbs each as the manufacturer says, the Alon sub towers are over 500 lbs easy. Alon/Nola specs both the main and sub towers at 300 lbs each.
I suspect Carl's scale maxes out at 300 lbs, as the subs are much heavier than the mains. And the system is much heavier than 1200 lbs as I learned from the freight bill
Also their design is a bit different in that the Alon has each driver matched to a front vent rather than side mounted passive radiator. Passive radiators and vents are not all that different, though, with each having its own benefits and drawbacks. Passive radiators conserves space but have high mass and can be somewhat slow. Vents have basically no mass (just the weight of the air in the tube) but can produce spurious noise if not properly designed. And they need lots of room, probably explaining the 26" depth of my sub towers.
I would also expect the GR and Alon bass systems to load the room somewhat differently because of the front-only output versus front+side output. Based on my experience with the Alons and VMPS, woofer arrays interact much less with the room that point source woofers. If I moved the VMPS a few inches in-room measured bass would change, sometimes dramatically. The Alons measure about the same wherever they are -- quite flat except for two room nodes that can be controlled with judicious use of parametric EQ. This works out well for me, as they look best in the corners and that is where I'm probably going to leave them.
Both the Alons and GR have each driver group (12" woofer + vent in the Alon, 12" woofer + 12" PR in the GR) in its own subcompartment which is definitely the way to go. Having multiple subwoofers sharing the same working space = bad.
I have
no doubt that a pair of the GR sub towers (even better, four sub towers in a double bass array!) with the forthcoming XBL^2-woofered LS-9 line array will make a phenomenal full range system, probably whipping anything in the $20-30k MSRP price range.
If the Neo8.8 doesn't have an ideal top end, I'd love to see an array with an added line of true ribbon tweeters (i.e. Raven, Aurum Cantus). Three way line arrays are not common and probaby very difficult to design. But that would be a system that may make me want to sell my Alons ...
