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.

Gallo is one of the only manufacturers who have decided to make their reference class product one that can live within the rooms and the budgets of "normal" audiophiles, i.e., consumers with average incomes. Many of us want world-class performance in our loudspeakers, but do not have a 1000 square foot listening room that will accommodate 6-foot tall 400-pound behemoths. We're willing to pay for quality, but can's spend more on loudspeakers than we did on our new car. The Gallo Reference 3.1s and Reference AV Center are for us.

The Reference 3.1s proved to be easy to set up, given their small size and low weight. The system was initially delivered without the Reference 3 S.A. amplifier, so I listened to them for a few weeks with only one of the two woofer voice coils driven. I usually just use review speakers for casual TV watching for the first week or to for break-in, but even for this mundane application, the Gallos already exhibited a clarity and detachment from the cabinets that promised something special to come.

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.

I have a particular affinity for imaging and soundstaging. That was what first opened my ears to hi-fi when I listened to a Mark Levinson/Wilson WATT-Puppy system at a fancy audio salon as a teenager. My desire is to have a speaker that can deliver a wide, high, and deep soundstage, completely detached from the loudspeakers. There should be no audio clue at all that the music has anything to do with the speakers.

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.

Dynamics, especially with the additional control at low frequencies provided by the Reference 3 S.A., were excellent, but slightly lacking when compared to ultra high sensitivity designs like the Triad Platinums I reviewed last. While I cannot say the music presented by the Reference 3.1s ever lacked excitement, I did have to listen at higher volume levels to achieve it. The Gallos were clearly vastly superior in this department to my low sensitivity Platinum Audio Solos, with far punchier macrodynamics, and greatly improved feeling and excitement provided by better microdynamics.

Click Here to Go to Part IV.

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