07-09-08: EujinI think the Gallo Ref 3.1's I heard had a setup problem. Have you ever noticed that some hi-fi shops have a "house sound"--where there's a certain tonality and imaging that every system setup has to some degree?
Johnnyb, funny you should mention it but the speakers I currently use are the Gallo 3.1. They're very capable of creating a very open, natural sound. They do, however, take a very long time to break in. The treble should not be dark or edgy if the speaker is broken in and paired with the right electronics. They can be very sensitive to location setup and especially with amplification.
At the shop I was at, their setups tend to sound hot and tizzy. They have one guy there who seems to be a detail and HF freak. One time he was playing some fusion on a system, largely to entertain himself between customers--and it was so tipped up it would have sent customers screaming from the room. At one time they carried Mirage during the Omnipolar period and even managed to make them sound quite hot, something I've never done (or tried to) at home, and I have 9 Mirage speakers NOT including subs.
I noticed, for example, that they had the woofers facing outward, and they were equidistant to the side walls. This is just asking for standing waves. Second, maybe the speakers were too close to the walls behind, or the walls were too hard or needed some absorption panels. The listening room certainly wasn't as big as where I'm going to install the OMD-15s. Omnis or very wide dispersion tweeters (like the 330-deg. Gallo tweet) have to be shelved down because the room reflections will bring the treble level back up again. If the Gallos aren't made that way, then they should have been farther out from the walls, in a much larger space, and/or had absorption panels behind and maybe to the sides.
The OMD-15s are on schedule to arrive tomorrow. But Mirage recommends 100 hours of break-in. If things sound encouraging right out of the box, I'll post initial reactions, but otherwise I'll be hanging tight for at least a week of FM and CD-on-repeat break-in before I try any critical listening with my favorite and beloved LPs.