You beat me to it. Greg Roberts not only own Volti, he is Volti, owner, designer, and manufacturer. I have spoken to him once in person at RMAF and exchanged brief emails about the upcoming Florida show. Once I knew we would both be there I saved us both the extra time of typing back and forth, much easier in person.
I did see the Twittering Machines review. I tend to set my room up very similar to Michael, speakers a good 1/3 into the room and coach is about 1/5 off the rear wall proper. Its a dedicated listening space so I have the luxury to do so. Speakers sound fine closer to the back wall but it seems when I pull them out I get a tremendously deep soundstage.
Great to see you are having such success with a broad group of amplification. I would love to the keep the front end, which to me is pretty neutral, the same and play around with amps to experience the different flavors of audio. Certainly seems like the Voltis will play that game. I am somewhat torn about keeping the XA30.8, works great but probably overkill even for the Razz. In my head if the Volti come to the house I would sell the XA30.8 and grab a XA25 and then with leftover change look at grabbing a tube amp for something different than the Pass. The XA25 in principle is pretty close to the Border Patrol PP amps Greg likes, 2 large high power transistors in the output stage in a pure Class A push pull arrangement. Many have described it as such also, most SET tube like sounding of all teh Pass amps. Interesting that you mentioned the SLI-80 because one thought was to chase down an old Cary Rocket 88 which best I can tell in the amplifier circuit in the SLI-80 minus the preamp stage. My Pass preamp kicks out plenty of voltage to drive the original Rocket 88 to clipping and would let my play around with the 6922 they replaced in the R version.
I did briefly talk to Greg about the new speaker, for those that don't get the newsletter, it sounds like he took the upper horn and 15" driver from the Rival with a new midrange horn in a smaller cabinet than the Rival. Price pretty much splits the Rival and Razz, $11.5K. Selfishly I was kind of hoping he would keep the 12" Razz driver and squeeze the Rival mid and upper horn into a slightly small cabinet at price around $10K (evil thoughts were going through my head of trying to escape Tampa with the show samples). However at that price point I would probably try the Razz first and if I fall in deep make the jump to the Rivals.
I suspect the external crossovers are the icing on the cake once you have everything else in your system ironed out. Probably not the biggest bang for the buck but if everything else is sorted and sweet ending.
Pretty cool to hear them rock out to Thievery Corp, right up my alley. And unless I am reading into everyones comments, given the wide range of music people seem to be listening to on the Volti they must be able to walk that fine line of providing all the details buried in the music but at the same time being tolerant of less than "audiophile" grade recordings.