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The first thing non-first-order listeners will probably notice in the company of a well set-up such design is better rhythmic acuity and percussive precision. I'm a sucker for excessively driven music like Flamenco and Cuban. Those styles celebrate fast rise times, complex beats and transient energy. Take the typical hand claps of Spanish Gypsy music called palmas, especially on something as unhinged as the Losada brothers. You should be able to tell whether the palmeros are using the heels of the hands, their hollow centers or how much finger surface is engaged. Some go 'pop', some go 'pow', some are dry like castanets, some are fleshier and other are in-between or different again, really being sticks tapped hard on the ground. Since the complicated fast staccatos of Flamenco require multiple offset hand clappers, you should definitely be able to tell them and their techniques apart. The rapid guitar arpeggios should be crystalline. Enter timing confusion and things either get a bit blurry and echo-y or unnaturally etched. Then they become all bite and metal and zing, completely divorced from the wooden resonator that is the expensive Conde Hermanos guitar body or whatever maker the instrumentalist might favor.


Reorganizing the modular nature of my Grand Prix Audio Monaco stands moved the amps away and down from the C3s' head units. This eliminated some early reflections that became audible in that subtle zone of atomic half-life, of miniature events surrounding individual notes in space. Think of studying something under a high-magnification microscope. At low magnification, you can bump the microscope without losing your focus too badly. But the higher you raise the magnification, the more critical bumps become. Even tiny external vibrations will now blur what you're looking at. Translated, this means that if a speaker is more precise than another in the time domain, it'll allow you to hear more. By the same token, this more can include things that aren't on the recording. Higher fidelity in the time domain simply means better separation - of original event, recorded venue reflections and listening room interference. Being less cavalier with speaker time means you've seemingly got more time on your hands to notice things. Of course it's not really more time. It's simply a heightened ability to sort out and perceive individual 'drops' and 'ripples'. You're no longer getting washed out by the pelting rain of multiple sounds coming down as an indistinct mess and mass.


You could think of this as an increase in sharpness; a removal of fuzz and gunk around and between the notes. That's why it's most noticeable on percussive events like a piano's hammer fall, a plucked steel string, a spiccato bow attack, rim shots or wooden clacks, vocal climaxes when voices get incisive or use fast sibilants like 's' and ts' sounds. Sharpness can suggest the wrong thing so articulation or precision are probably keener descriptors. Still, if you're used to or love a warm sound that's a bit bloomy and soft-focus, the Continuum 3 might seem cool and mechanical. It isn't - but it definitely ain't warm and fuzzy either. Roy Johnson tells me he's so tuned into time domain aberrations that his speakers allow him to hear overshoots in digital cables and insufficient rise times in amplifiers. Needless to say, he and other 1st-order designers have trained themselves what, exactly, to pay attention to. Pleasure listeners needn't know or recognize why it is that they're suddenly hearing more and with greater clarity. After all, everybody can enjoy a great meal or painting without understanding how it was made. But reviewers are expected to explain what distinguishes one product from another. Zut alors! Suddenly we're knee-deep in alligators of analysis. And that has a tendency to make things
seem more complicated than they really are. Schweinehund!


So here's the same observation repackaged - just in case. Do you know what single-driver Lowther or Fostex speakers sound like? Perfect. Now you have a pretty good notion of what the Continuum 3 approaches. In fact, our own Jules Coleman lived with the older Continuum 1.5 [right] after years of single-driver immersion. He calls it the only crossover'd multi-way speaker that at the time could keep up in the coherence sweepstakes by comparison. Back to one-driver designs. However, now think no peakiness, no hyped incisiveness that comes from it and a lack of LF foundation. Expand the frequency extremes especially in the bass to put honest weight into the loafers. The Continuum 3's well-damped 12-incher delivers those goods in a very serious way. It not only goes low and very articulately so even at low volumes -- and when driven by 30-watt tube amps with lowly damping factors no less -- but allows bass notes to ring out without being prematurely murdered by excessively low box Q.


Strategic damping via thick fiberglass panels; a very unusually shaped main brace visible via flash light through the 4" diameter flared port; extra thick walls of triple-layer composition; plus the decoupling of the bass cabinet from the head unit all combine to spell exceptional bass performance - and that from someone who's used to the Avantgarde Duos' four sealed 10" woofers driven by their own dedicated high-current 250-watt transistor amps! One advantage which self-powered bass units tend to have is that they react to even minuscule signal inputs. They come to life immediately and counter the Fletcher-Munson curves of psychoacoustics that roll off bass information at very low playback volumes. Most passive full-range speakers want to be goosed a bit before they deliver the low frequencies unstunted. The Continuum 3 is fairly unique in that regard. It opens the curtain all the way and deep into the bass very early on into the volume games.


That said, the full LF weight which it is clearly capable of does want higher damping factors than my 30-watt SEPs could muster. Bel Canto Design's eVo 4 Gen.II stood in for higher-current high-power examples with essentially zero output impedance. Diana Krall's left-handed piano attacks suddenly had more power than before while the midrange and treble sacrificed some finesse to my tube amps. C'est la vie audiophielle. I'd say 30-50wpc should be the minimum amplification muscle on these Green Mountain Audio speakers. Whether you decide on valves or transistors is purely up to you. Should you go valves, opt for lower rather than higher output impedances. The designer is particularly fond of Edge amplifiers driven by Birdland's Odeon DAC/preamp via Audio Magic silver ribbon cables.


The modified Morel tweeter and its implementation might arguably be the driver Roy Johnson is most proud of (it appears again in the new Calypso). The one Achilles heel common to all 1st-order designs is the vulnerability of the tweeter. It essentially runs wide open and extends far lower than is normal. That makes it a prime target for volume-induced over-drive and subsequent meltdown. Alas, the C3's unit is the Death Valley survivor of tweeters melting like tires on boiling blacktop. While anything can be destroyed if you play it loud enough long enough, Roy's Tangerine Dream demo in Taos and other obnoxiously loud interludes at his Denver Show exhibit allayed any doubts. Even the most deaf of headbangers can enjoy these 1st-order designs for vicious party animal times. True, potential tweeter death is a weakness of the 1st-order design philosophy in general but no, the Continuum 3 doesn't seem to suffer from it. I'll put this as plainly as possible: Should you fry this tweeter from voice-coil induced overheating, your hearing is so badly ruined that you and audiophilia are complete strangers who live in a -- very -- strange land.


Certain Denver Show visitors didn't enter the Green Mountain Audio/Audio Magic room because of excessive loudness levels during their particular approach. In retrospect, they might forgive the demonstrators. They didn't so much want to write out a blank check for noise pollution as simply prove how their designs can rock down the house with the best of the 4th-order sizzlers. Here's another myth that, in his marketing propaganda, I've seen one designer of higher-order filters in particular perpetrate. He explains his reliance on steep networks and trash-talks phase coherence in turn by belaboring the need of 1st-order owners to play rabbit-in-the-headlights, e.g. remain frozen in the hot seat of the listening couch to prevent severe tonal shifts. What cockamamie! In fact, one tried-and-true test of speaker prowess occurs in the adjacent room (with the door left open, of course). Shy of soundstaging, does the sound change in any significant way? With most speakers, it does. My Avantgardes are one of the few that sound as good next door as they do sitting right in front of 'em. Add the C3s to this short list. There's another trick they pull. The tilt range of the head unit was deliberately designed such that should you set up these speakers in a large space where listening takes place standing around a billiard table in the farfield distance, you may do so without any of the usual penalties. Real-world smarts, that!


Naturally, optimal soundfield convergence must remain confined to a particular area. After all, the word 'convergence' in physical-focus usage implies a concrete point, not infinity. However, leaving that area does not mean the sound becomes unlistenable. Oh contraire. If you own a race car, you can take it home on the public street and it'll perform as good or better than a consumer car. But to truly explain its existence and experience its raison d'être, you put it on the race track where it transcends ordinary tarmac behavior. People who diss 1st-order designs conveniently overlook a very vital aspect. Time-incoherent speaker don't offer in any listening seat of the house what time-coherent speakers do in one optimized chair. Why attack this breed for offering more just because this more gels into perfection only in one particular spot? That's simply illogical and not very sportsman-like. The truth is that when the time domain becomes established as perfectly as humanly possible in the chosen seat, a window opens and certain micro details become audible. Those nuances rely on this type of superior precision and separation to come to the fore. Since this window must close by definition when time arrivals are no longer coincident, you can compare results (which other designs don't allow for). This comparison let's you hear when things are spot-on. Even when they're no longer quite on the spot -- e.g. when the microscopic resolving power has stepped down a bit -- the results are still phenomenal and at least as good as what other speakers manage. Granted, not everyone will care enough about what you can view through this window. Not everyone will put up with the expense or calibration process of opening up this window in the first place.


Chances are that those who attack 1st-order speakers are incapable of designing one that truly works and overcomes the particular challenges of this road to Rome. When done properly as in the Continuum 3, it's impossible to understand why anyone would attack such a design for anything other than the inordinately long time it takes to get one right. The folks from Starsound Technologies produce the 1st-order series Caravelle that's inbound for review. They confided in Denver how many long years they've been working on it. Ditto for the Reference 3A designs; the original Bud Fried transmission-line models; the new 1st-order series Ultimate Monitor by Karl Schuemann. Those who walk that particular path pay for it dearly in protracted R&D times. You've simply got less tools to fix what's wrong. Companies that rely on revamping their lineup once a year to keep things fresh will not embrace the added rigors which the 1st-order discipline demands. Companies that cater to large-volume stores will likely balk at spending more than a few bucks on a tweeter that'll work perfectly fine in a 4th-order network. That doesn't mean that higher-order designs can't be enjoyable. The market rather proves the opposite, doesn't it? But it also seems to be the case that once you've come to appreciate
what 1st-order designs do better -- call it finer P.R.A.T., call it more immediacy, call it greater transparency, accuracy or incisiveness -- you can't revert to other topologies afterwards. Our own Paul Candy squarely lives in that camp now. Seeing that my Gallos are pure 1st-order series, I too seem to be reasonably sensitive to the allure of time coherence. SoundStage!'s Doug Blackburn definitely belongs to our secret club. So beware - this stuff could be addictive. Pass it around then.


Here's one more boost - er, boon. Obviously, time coherence relies on phase coherence (though phase coherence by itself is achievable without time alignment. Simply 'forward' phase errors in time until they're back to zero degree, albeit delayed by one or two full rotations in time). It goes without saying that a time-coherent speaker like the Continuum 3 is free from steep phase angles. It thus becomes a prime candidate for lower-powered amplifiers not endowed with a mondo mono ultra-stiff power supply that eats phase angles for lunch. Now that we have a good overview of where the C3 excels, let's tease out how this manifests during listening to specific tracks and whether there's a relative area of weakness to be found somewhere. After all, nothing like a speaker can aspire to perfection, can it now?