If you get close to the speaker when it is playing even moderately loudly and place a stethoscope on the surface, you will hear much more noise (mostly in the bass and mid-bass) coming from it than from the cabinet of any really first rate speaker (B&W, KEF, Revel, etc). This issue is a major design target for most high and even not so high end speakers - an acoustically non-resonant cabinet. Given that this has a metal structure, the resonance is not bad and pretty well controlled, but compared to a top wooden MFB it is really not so great. I notice that the sound seems cleaner, but of course this could be just auto-suggestion. Double blind testing would confirm whether it is an issue, but I am happy with the now totally inert surfaces that I have on my 3.1s.
best, Doug |
I can't figure out why they are charging almost twice as much, with only minor tweaks to two of the drivers.
Additionally, the new speaker needs to address the real Achilles heel of the previous design, which was the very considerable resonances of the (metal!!!) 'cabinet' (frame). I found that covering many of the exposed metal flat surfaces with adhesively backed neoprene killed most of the very noticeable frame resonance. For about $175 you can get enough 1/8 inch neoprene from VibraSystems to do the job. No one seems to have ID'ed this issue, but my listening tests suggested that this treatment of the metal surfaces does clean up the speaker a bit. Of course a direct A/B comparison would be best. I suspect that if John Atkinson at Stereophile ever reviewed this speaker (either the 3.1 or the new 3.5), he would climb all over the resonance issue. Tribute to the rest of the design that they sound as good as they do.
best, DW |
No problem, I appreciate the clarification (couldn't tell if you were teasing (which is always OK) or being dismissive - my fault for assuming the latter.
I take it you have a pair of 3's (3.0 or 3.1?). I am eagerly awaiting the appearance of the 3.5s. It does sound like Gallo did quite a bit of work smoothing things out even more. Just a bit pricey at barely this side of 6K. Some of the online sellers (which means you lose the warranty thru Gallo) might have them for mid to high 4's. Will be interesting. . . . really wish that Stereophile would review them. Atkinson's stuff is the current industry benchmark IMHO for technical and quantitative assessments of loudspeakers. Love to see it, and don't understand why they haven't - the usual stuff about only reviewing advertiser's products (which has some truth I suppose) doesn't explain it. Anyone know why Stereophile has ducked this?? - the speculation of course is that it would upset the apple cart to have such a small relatively cheap speaker blow away the high end products. The field is still recovering from the trauma of the first controlling listening tests on amps - did so much damage that no one wants to touch that subject.
best, Doug |
Let's put aside the unappreciated sarcasm about listening to Gallos with a stethoscope.
Since I don't have an accelerometer (what Stereophile uses to evaluate cabinet resonance issues), I had to make due, and I can tell you that if you listen to the Gallos 'frame" cabinet and compare it to a really inert B&W or recent KEF design at the same volume level, the difference is pretty striking. I think that "Spiritualized" is really missing the point - despite the 3.1 being a brilliant speaker and design, it isn't perfect and has one flaw - that flaw relates in part to one of the brilliant aspects of the design, namely the ability to have virtually no cabinet that creates diffraction effects that muddy the sound. That design approach requires a metal structure to support the D'Appolito array, and metal resonates (hello!). Even though Gallo I'm sure has tried to minimize that.
The issues is whether those effects reach any kind of audibility or not. The 'floor' for that varies depending on material and loudness, but most people feel that anything more than 30 db below say an 80 db foreground event is largely inaudible. Certainly anything 40 db below that is inaudible. Audibility is lessened if the material is an harmonic of the foreground sound. Of course, all this works in the favor of any speaker designer, and suggests that most of the time cabinet resonant effects are simply inaudible.
I did today a single blinded trial (comparing the two channels playing the same signal while I didn't know which speaker was playing - the stock one or the one with the applied anti-vibration treatment. Although I couldn't tell any difference between the two at lower volumes at really high volumes I could pick out the speaker with the treatment about 75% of the time, as the one sounding very slightly clearer. I didn't know which was which as someone else was doing the switching and was under strict instructions not to provide me with any cues. Some material didn't provide a basis for distinguishing the two speakers, but material with large amounts of bass however did. When I did my testing of the frame resonances, it is mostly in the bass that there is anything being produced.
I am still not totally convinced (75% over 12 trials is greater than chance but not that much greater), but I am happy with the results and they are easily reversible as the vibration dampening material peals off easily.
There is some science to this, but I don't have the equipment or the time frankly to due the testing. Hope this clarifies the issue for those who are totally skeptical. If you think this is just a crock, take a stethoscope, put on something at say 90 db or so, and start listen to how loud different cabinets are across speakers. You will be amazed at the differences, not just in terms of loudness, but in terms of frequencies. |
By really high volume levels I mean something like 50 to 100 W per channel. In other words not deafening but just realistic sound levels. I don't think I'm exceeding 90-95 db in my large room.
I also would not want my comments to be construed as any kind of indictment of the speaker. I think that this is clearly the best speaker for the money, and probably the best speaker for under $6000 easily. I think it's actually a better speaker than the $8000 B. and W. 800 diamond series floor stander (forgotten the model number). in fact I think the speaker might be the best value in high end audio but that does not mean that it can't be improved. A more aesthetic solution would be to apply dampening compounds to the interior of the frame but I suspect Gallo has already done something like that because certainly the frame does not resonate the way untreated metal might.in any case, I'm happy with my results, and so are you!
Curious what your general impression of the Gallo amp is? do you have it connected from speaker level or line level inputs? Can you tell the difference on classical music and popular music? The speakers already have pretty good bass but I have been thinking seriously about buying the amp. any recommendations or cautions would be appreciated.
Best, Doug |
Thanks very much for that link. I think I might've scanned that piece earlier, but now I read it more carefully. I certainly think Gallo is on the right track and I agree with everything that he says. I did not know he was absorbing so many extra costs in order to maintain the price point of the original Reference Threes and 3.1. It makes sense unfortunately that the speaker cost has virtually doubled. He clearly is a gifted designer and very thoughtful about design targets.
I do have some major questions though about the widespread assumption that absolute phase integrity (a virtually physically impossible design target in a discrete three-way system except perhaps in a tiny listening window) is nearly as important to the audible illusion of a music source compared to flat frequency response and some other things. In sources that are time coherent but not time aligned (such as newer BMW and KEF designs) the amount of delay between the arrival times of wave fronts coming from woofer versus mid range versus tweeter is on the order of 1 to 3 ms or so. Although virtually everyone would agree that it is theoretically desirable to have complete phase integrity, I don't believe anyone has demonstrated in double blind testing that a 1 to 3 ms phase smear is really truly audible. What is clearly audible on the other hand are things like transient response, and frequency response and intermodular distortion (many times more audible than classic harmonic distortion). Additionally, designs that prioritize phase alignment have to make sacrifices in other things that are audible (read the excellent Stereophile review of one of Thiel's speakers at http://stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1208thi/.
There is pretty good physical evidence that transient response and these other things are intrinsically related, in other words that great transient response predicts a flat frequency response and even a good phase response and relatively low IM distortion.
I think human beings are great at constructing plausible story-lines to explain something, but many of our plausible stories turn out not to be true. Science is literally littered with the corpses of dead highly plausible theories and we still have to test even our favorite ideas that seem totally commonsensical against some kind of empirical prediction. I have not seen a truly careful test double blinded of phase smear at very small time frames (have enough literature in my own area to review and stay on top of).
Part of the reason I'm skeptical is that I don't think there's much reason why evolution would've carved the ability to detect these things because they have very little application in the real world to basic mammalian survival tasks. Unless phase smear at very small time scales meant that we could not identify either the spatial location or the source of a noise (and these are clearly unaffected), is not clear to me that there would be any selection process for such abilities. I honestly don't know what the work is in this area, and I'm sure that phase smear becomes audible at some point (my guess is somewhere probably around 100 to 200 ms). But I believe that very few speakers have that degree of phase delay. Thiel has made a killing selling the idea that extremely small phase delays or mismatches make a big audible difference, and although I have considerable respect for his speakers and for him personally, I don't agree that there is compelling evidence for such an assumption. Of course it's possible that some people's brains can hear small degrees of phase misalignment while other people cannot.
Anybody know of any carefully done research in psychoacoustics to address this question? I'd be interested.
best, Doug |
Hi Bob
Fair questions. I have a power meter on the amp. I am just guessing about sound levels based on the rough efficiency of the speaker (which I think is a bit less efficient than rated - these are real power hogs). I don't like move theater sound levels (aren't they ridiculous, esp. on the trailers?) so I know I am under those by a bit.
best, Doug |
Very interesting, and it fits with Gallo's own statements. What did Wes Philips actually say about the speaker? |
BTW, and totally unrelated to anything we have been talking about, I finally got an NAD receiver working with the 3.1s. The audyssey EQ program is really pretty impressive and the changes that it makes to the speaker's output suggests that the presence regions 1-2.5K are perhaps a bit depressed on the 3.1s? Although I tend to hate equalization of any kind, I couldn't really find myself preferring the stock speaker response anymore after listening to the various compensated EQs - one a ruler flat one, one the stock or standard Audyssey curve and another that is an NAD proprietary curve that is slightly warmer and fuller sounding than the flat EQ. All of them however, boosted the speakers output in the presence regions. Interesting . . . . Curious to try this with some other speakers that have markedly different coloration from the Gallos to see if they end up sounding like them when equalized. Anyone else with experience with this program?
best, Doug |
Hi Dan
Thanks for your posting. I also owned a great pair of 104.2s for about 25 years - loved them, and sometimes have wished I kept them instead of selling them. Great speaker, and the 3.1 is in many ways a modern update of it. D'Appolito midrange array, but with better high end and low end - perhaps not quite as good midrange, but the 104.2 was a tough act to follow in that regard.
Have been fiddling around with the Audyssey and have gotten what seems to be a good (not radical) EQ - The NAD has a version of the EQ that is still warmer sounding than the flat EQ, but that makes up for upper midrange-low treble depression in the 3.1. With that EQ program engaged, the speaker sounds remarkably neutral, and interestingly, it trims the bass back just a bit, perhaps too much so for my tastes, but it shows that there is the standard mid-bass hump in the speaker's response when near any kind of boundary. My fiancee likes the bigger bass of the stock stereo without the Audyssey room response correction. but there is no accounting for taste!
I suspect that the 3.5 will fill that area in, but with the EQ, I feel I already have that. And I also spent some time recently dampening the speaker frame resonances, so that now played really loud, there is little noise coming from the metal frame. Still not sure that those frame resonances are truly audible, but compared to a box from B&W or KEF, this thing was a bit of a 'gong' in its stock form.
DW |
Sorry to be late in responding, swamped at the hospital (where I practice).
The KEFs were still in great shape, because the woofer surrounds were the 2nd generation rubber ones and not the foam ones, and thus still perfect. I sometimes wish I hadn't sold them, because finding as good a speaker for what I got paid seems a long shot, although I do like the Pol LSi15s that were not much more money, but way too boomy in the bass without correction. I would be happy to attach pictures of the frame dampened 3.1s but don't see how to attach a photo on this interface? Send me your email and I can forward some pics. I figured that Gallo has done some dampening already, because otherwise they would ring like a churchbell, but now the frames are just plain acoustically inert.
best, Doug |
I saw those - the aesthetics however leave a lot to be desired and the price is really up there. Isn't there an alternative in terms of someone else making a stand that is the same size as the base? Can't recall the name though . . . .
DW |
Very interesting and thanks for that Bolson. I wonder if the audiophile press will now take the speaker more seriously that it has now passed out of reach of most people. What about the alternative wood stands from someone else - can't recall the name. Anyone had any experience with the Gallo subamp in terms of whether line level inputs or speaker inputs work better?
thanks, Doug |
Hi Dave
Thanks for your response. Those numbers don't sound off to me, esp. with even just some modest boundary reinforcement. Which line level outputs are you using? Separates and a preamp output? Subwoofer outputs on an AV receiver? I have an NAD and wondering which ones would work best.
Why do you think there would be any real advantage to the stands that offer actually less vertical elevation (although perhaps with more elevation of the aim of the speaker)? Did you do any objective testing? Seems like the issue is just getting the speaker up or even just aimed up.
I will have a FFT kit shortly to do some testing of my own. Should be most interesting. I certainly am very pleased with the 3.1s and the NAD Audyssey EQ profiles. They do seem to really smooth out the speaker even more. I am using the stock spikes only at the front though to get more elevation of the midrange/tweeter axis which itself makes quite a difference.
Curious about the Stein stands - aesthetics would be a major concern with the Mapleshades. |
Hi Dave
Wondering if you have compared the Mapleshades and the Stein stands? The steins appear to be a bit more attractive.
best, Doug |
