I went in to listen to the Gallos today at Ahead Stereo in Los Angeles. I was listening to them with a Rotel 1065 Integrated Amp and a Music Fidelity A3.5 CD player. I then compared the Gallos with the B&W 703 speakers. My impressions:
I was both testing the speakers and testing to make sure I wanted to spend the big bucks on a new music system. I do. It was amazing. I felt like I was just listening to more of the music. I was worried because a lot of my music is older recordings and I didn't want to just be listening to flaws in the recording technology. Even on some poooor recordings (Toots and the Maytals original "54-46 That's my number"), it was significantly better. Strangely, the only thing that didn't sound that good on either speaker was Solomon Burke's "Home in Your Heart" compilation. That's sad, because his voice is amazing. Perhaps it is the mastering. I spent about 40 minutes with the Reference 3.1's. I was excited the whole time and wanted to both be listening to the same album more and listen to how they played another album. It did a particularly good job capturing a sort of ethereal quality, such as is found in the singing on The Congo's "Heart of the Congos." The bass was rather weak where I was sitted, but I don't think it was set up that well in the listening room. Standing further back, it was much better. The speaker also wasn't placed on its spikes, rather just directly on the carpet. Nonetheless, the bass was high quality no matter where I was. (This was without the Gallo's separate sub-woofer amp driving the second voice coil.) I did not like the B & W's nearly as well. Part of it was that the bass was a lot more muddy, both accustic bass on Jazz recordings (Jimmy Garrison on Coltrane's "Live at Birdland" and Scott La Farro on Bill Evan's "Sunday at the Village Vanguard"). But I also didn't like how it treated voices. The Congos voices became a little less ethereal. But there was something more to it I didn't like. I couldn't quite my finger on it, but it was there. Perhaps I had been listening to speakers for too long, but after about 20 minutes I wanted to turn it down and wrap up my listening session. It is hard to say if this is because it was the second speaker I listened too, but this never happened with the Gallos. I was going to listen to the best system in the house, but someone else was doing so and my ears were a bit fatigued. I took Robert Hurley's advice and just compared two pieces of equipment. -- Hypnotoad ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hypnotoad's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11812 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35766 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
