[mca]

I am really intrigued by the Anthony Gallo Due' speakers. They have a cool hi-tech look and a very interesting design that seems to make a lot of sense. Seems to me a pair of these with a couple of nice small subs could be a really cool setup. There is only one dealer near me and they only carry the smaller Micro speakers.
Now I see on the Sixmoons website a new review of the Reference III full size speaker and it sounds like Srajan really likes them!

[Val]

I am familiar with several iterations of the original Solos and References, they were both extremely good and perhaps the best (what does best mean?) at their price points, and I expect the new Reference III to also be a high quality speaker. The same main strengths seem to be there, a wonderful tweeter that dissolves the room walls and the ability of the speaker to image superbly and totally dissapear because of the low diffraction cabinet. I don't know if the punchy bass of the original Dynaudio woofer is replicated by the new bass drivers.

I am saving for a new system and it is now the first on my short list to audition.

[zybar]

I owned a pair of Nucleus Refedrences for around 5 years and they were great speakers.

They imaged extremely well, disappeared like no other speaker I have heard and had a tweeter that seemed to cover the whole room!  They had tight, articulate bass and really got your toes tapping when listening to music.  I also thought they were an easy load to drive (I used anything from 18 watts of SET to 600 watts of SS).

So why did I eventually sell them?

1.  I always heard the transition from that incredible tweeter to the conventional woofers - it wasn't seemless to me.

2.  The 6" woofers could only move so much air.  Although they were very punchy, it wasn't enough for me when I bought my house and had a dedicated room (25x18x7).

3.  I didn't like owning speakers that were out of production.  This is a personal choice.  

I wouldn't hesitate to audition the new Gallos.

Hope this helps a bit.

George

[bally]

Theres a preview of the new Gallo Ref. Speakers on 6moons .com.Srajan seems to be very impressed.Pricing looks pretty good.
Cheers
Peter

[nathanm]

As a new owner of a pair of used Nucleus Solos I can whole heartedly agree with Zybar's summation.  It is a damned shame that they stopped making these speakers.  (and only for WAF factors I've heard rumored - a crying shame, what the hell is wrong with you Ws out there!?)  I've got them hooked up to my home theater gear at the moment (consisting entirely of the cheapest gear money can buy) and they totally kick ass.  That CDT tweeter is something else - for once you actually are hearing the LOWER half of the frequency spectrum becoming more directional as you move around the room!  But it's not what I would call beamy though.  There IS a slight phase shift between tweeter and woofer when you move from sitting to standing, as is to be expected from two drivers of different designs spaced apart from each other, but it is not objectionable.  Hell, I put in a Usurper CD which was produced by Neil Kernon, a guy whose work I HATE and expected the treble to be brittle and nasty sounding, but it was smooth and unfatiguing!  Snobby Stereophile demo tracks with killer room-soundy live recordings came across as very present and 'in-the-room'.  Mr. Gallo was definitely on the right track with this design.  Amazing bass for such a small speaker too.  Spheres are where it's at if you ask me.  There ought to be more spherical speakers dammit!

So if you got 2 grand you'd be a fool to not go and snatch up Russtafarian's pair on Audiogon (despite those photos )  They are the cat's ass.

[zybar]

Nathan,

To be honest, the new Gallos improve on the old ones so your money would be better spent on a new pair vs. old one.  

Doesn't mean they aren't good speakers...

George

[nathanm]

Perhaps so, (haven't heard the new ones) but asthetically speaking the new ones don't look nearly as cool as the spheres IMO.  They're cool sure, but that sauce pan woofer isn't quite as nifty as a sphere.  If it was up to me I'd put a bigger woofer 'bass ball' underneath the 12" sphere\CDT tweeter for a hifi snowman effect!

[Tonto Yoder]

Snowman?? Did someone say "snowman"?
How about putting a Blue Room Mini-pad on steroids to get a Maxi-Pad (for those special days)??

[nathanm]

Ahh yes, the candy coated maggot speaker!  Anyone remember that toy "Cooties" by chance? Heh.  (paint it matte brown, remove two legs and you could call it the Shit On A Stick speaker! ) That speaker wants to be cool, it tries, but alas it just doesn't quite make it.   For one there's that seam around the driver, then I assume the case is plastic - can't hold a candle to anodized aluminum IMHO.  Plus they're amorphous lumps instead of spheres.  I dunno, it just looks chintzy, like a prop decoration.  Plus yellow speaker cones never look very good IMO.

[MaxCast]

  bass ball,  shit on a stick....

Did someone say aluminum????  Anyone want to invest in an aluminum cabinet?  Like Big B says, send me bukoo bucks and I'll build it.

[nathanm]

Check these guys out.  This joint is just "down the road" from me.  I have no idea what the tooling costs etc. would be, but these people could make metal spheres.  I'd love to take a crack at a DIY project.  For example, how about the 3" Tangbands in a sphere?  What about that 4" Fostex Ed Schilling uses?  Tannoy Dual concentrics!?
It'd be pretty cool.

http://WWW.centurymetalspinning.com/products/

The video on the site is really cool too.  I had not really been aware of this process before, but it's cool to watch it being done.

To my mind Gallo's real genius is that tweeter, but spherical cabinets would seem to be within the grasp of halfwit wannabe machinists like myself for a price.

[dwk]

 I'd love to take a crack at a DIY project.  For example, how about the 3" Tangbands in a sphere?  What about that 4" Fostex Ed Schilling uses?  Tannoy Dual concentrics!?

Funny you should mention the Tannoys, as Tannoys-in-a-sphere is on my list of possible projects.  Way back, I made a '(very) poor mans Gallo' using one of the Rat Shack Linaeum dipole tweeters perched atop a Seas mid-woof in a homebrew sphere (plastic light globe covered with plaster- UGLY).  Sealed, so no bass at all, but yowza did they image like mad.

I have a pair of the Tannoy system 600's which use the 6.5" dual-concentric. Yeah, not the coveted high-efficiency units, but still about as good as it gets for co-axial drivers as far as I can determine.  The two possible projects they're slated for are
a) "MTM" with some 7" drivers and a homebrew transient-perfect digital xover (much easier)
b) in a sphere but still with a TP xover. (way harder, but serious cool factor).

I'd been thinking  of roughing up the sphere with hexagonal donuts cut/spliced from standard 2x4's, and then either routing down the excess with a jig of some sort, or else just building up/filling in with Bondo or something.  Building/Filling would probably be easier, and would probably be easier to finish.

[mca]

I made a trip today from Seattle down to Portland to get a listen to these speakers. Smoooooth! They sounded really good in a small room hooked up to lower end Musical Fidelity gear. Everything I played sounded sweet with a huge soundstage. When I closed my eyes, I could not distinguish where the vocals were coming from. Boz Scaggs and Dianna Krall sounded like they were in the room singing to me.
There is some great acoustic guitar on The Tragically Hip's "Up to Here" and it was the best I had ever heard it. It lust sounded like I was really hearing into every note like I had not before.
Robert Cray's "Sweet Potato Pie" has some great bass and it came through with great power and solidity. The speakers are so small when you see them in person and I was really suprised at the huge sound that they could put out. I had to catch myself a couple of times because I was playing them pretty loud wouthout really noticing, I thought the salesman was going to come in and tell my to turn them down.
I came away very impressed. Unfortunatly, they only had the one demo pair and I could not talk him out of them. I really want to be able to get a pair that I can try out at home and hope that they can produce the same sound they did in that room. Makes me really wonder how they sound with the Gallo bass module hooked up  

[lonewolfny42]

mca,

How do they compare to your Zu speakers ??[/list:u]
I got to listen to the Gallo speakers at HE 2004 , but they were in a HT setup , playing the movie "Drum Line", ...not the way I really wanted to hear them !! [/list:u]

[mca]

The Zu's ended up not being my cup of tea. They were just to analytical and forward sounding in my system. I ended up returning them because of that and since they also arrived to me with shipping damage due to poor packaging.

[brj]

I still haven't had a chance to audition the Ref III's yet, but plan too.  One of the things that concerns be a bit is the cross from the side-firing woofers to the forward firing mids/CDT 2 tweeter.  From what I can tell by reading, the bass drivers extend upward enough into the frequency spectrum to cover bass that would definitely be considered directional (i.e. above 40 Hz or the boundary value of your choice).  Doesn't the lack of some forward firing bass cause problems?

By the way, is the "Bass Augmentation Module" one of the Gallo subs, or something else added to the Ref III itself?

Thanks!

[zybar]

BRJ,

Just go listen to the speakers and decide if you like them.  Why are concerned about front firing or side firing?  Unless there is a reason side firing won't work in your environment, side firing is a perfectly acceptable way of implementing a speaker.

The Gallo BAM is an amp with built in crossover functionality.  You need a crossover to use the second vc on the Ref III's.

Hope this helps.

George

[lonewolfny42]

The Zu's ....... they also arrived to me with shipping damage due to poor packaging.

Once again another company packing their product poorly = shipping damage. Charge a few dollars more and pack it right !!!