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The Sound I am a two-channel audio man at heart. While I love home theater, my primary interest is music. I would love to have a separate two-channel audio rig and a purpose-built home theater, but my house and the budget do not allow it. One system has to deliver the goods for both applications. On paper, this
Gallo system seems to be ideal for this application, and my auditioning has
proven this to be correct. To let the punch line out of the bag early, I
decided rather quickly that I would buy the entire system at the end of the
review, rather than return it. After a week of pensive
waiting, I sat down to listen to my new Gomez CD, How We Operate. I had
listened to this album once before with my Platinum Audio Solo/REL Strata II
combo, and liked it, but as usual, with rock albums, I was not particularly
impressed with the recording. When the first track began, I grabbed the CD
box to see if someone had replaced my CD with a SACD. Nope. The clarity,
air, soundstaging precision, and realistic timbre of the vocals were
stunning. The album was completely different. This is one of the Holy Grails
of hi-fi: a component that improves the sound reproduction so thoroughly
it's like having a brand new library of music appear on the shelves. Many speakers can deliver a solid central image. A smaller subset can clearly create images throughout the soundstage, but only an elite number can free the sound completely from the cabinets. My Solos did an admirable job in this department, but suffered from limited soundstage depth. More seriously, the soundstage was truncated immediately at the loudspeakers from left to right. This could be somewhat remedied by very high quality amplification (i.e., the Classé CAP-2100 integrated amplifier I reviewed previously). This truncation broke the illusion, revealing that the speaker cabinets had something to do with the sound. The Gallo Reference 3.1s have no such restriction. The soundstage extends to the right and left of the speaker positions effortlessly, while retaining significant depth and height. I can easily imagine even better performance with more careful setup, but my room layout demands that the speakers be placed in one particular location. Image positions and delineation were razor sharp with the Gallos, although the image sizes presented were smaller than "real life," a characteristic of any physically small loudspeaker. You might expect this type of transcendent imaging and soundstaging performance from the Gallo design. Cabinet diffraction effects are a prime culprit in compromising soundstaging. This is a reason why mini-monitors are said to usually have great imaging; their small cabinets offer less front baffle area for diffraction to occur. The Gallos have no front baffle at all. The drivers are mounted in enclosures that have the same diameter as the driver, and are held from behind by a thin pillar. There are few sites available to create diffraction that will make it to the listener's ears. The CDT II tweeter, with its 3000 dispersion, is virtually omnidirectional in the horizontal plane, which again eliminates any edge effects. Another less obvious aspect of imaging performance struck me after living with the Gallos for some time: bass imaging. Low frequencies are theoretically omnidirectional. Once the wavelength of sound exceeds the distance between your ears by a significant amount, so that the phase difference from one ear to the other is small, it becomes very difficult hear where the sound is coming from. This description does not take into account that we hear bass
frequencies with our ears and feel them with our skin. We can locate the
source of bass through this second method. I have had a single subwoofer
located in the room corner for several years. While the sound was mostly omnidirectional, I was always aware that the bass energy was indeed coming
from the room corner. With the stereo woofers of the Reference 3.1s, the bass
energy is perfectly balanced. This is another subtle but important step
closer to realistic sound reproduction.
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