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The reader who's long since put 1 + 1 together in this review won't be surprised when I say that the Continuum 3 is very bare-boned in the usual and perhaps pleasurable buffering of intrinsic warmth and romance. Its designer would consider this signal manipulation if you -- like him -- considered the role of a speaker not as creative interpreter but as time-pressed delivery boy. Say you've ordered spicy thin-crust pepperoni pizza with red peppers, sweet onions and meatballs. Goddamn it, that's what you expect at your door, not some long-winded flowery explanation about why what's under the lid is late, soggy and different from what you ordered. Was your phone signal not clear enough? Sorry, no tip, buster.


Watching Roy Johnson in action -- his Colorado Springs digs is a 4.5-hour drive from Taos, hence I enjoyed a personal delivery -- had him fix the time alignment while I was sitting in the hot seat listening to the changes. I  can guarantee that any minor hardness or undue sibilance you might encounter during this process is not a function of the speaker but incorrectly chosen alignment (or upstream errors). Especially charged female vocals of world-class singers who can tear it up without peeling down the wallpaper may, in past encounters, have elicited some glassiness or going just slightly over the edge. It's something you may have pinned on momentary mike overload. It will come as an unexpected surprise to see this magically disappear when the Continuum 3s are dialed in just so. Been there, done that, become a believer. Amen, brother!


That said, it should be nearly axiomatic that a speaker excelling at speed, accuracy and transparency might come across as inherently lean when compared to speakers that are a bit slower and fuzzier. This leanness isn't a function of lack in bottom octave foundation. No, that's as developed and appropriately scaled as imaginable. It's a function of cleanliness. Trimming a beard makes a face look narrower. Removing speaker-based resonance distortion into a component rack via Grand Prix Audio's Apex floor decouplers can lean out especially bass confusion while obviously enhancing clarity and detail retrieval in turn. Ditto for removing cabinet flex and time smear from a speaker.
You end up with precision but no spare meat unless it's on the recording with longer reverberation times or part of the preceding chain by way of tubular enhancements or tone. Don't let this statement suggest the C3 is bleached. It isn't. At all. It's simply exceptionally honest about what it's fed. It could thus belong to the recording monitor school of speaker design were it not for two distinct aspects. One, the aforementioned bass extension and tuneful articulation tends to be MIA in most recording studio monitors that simply don't go that low. Two, the extreme depth perspective of the Continuum 3s is not something most speakers ever manage to begin with. Nor is it an ingredient of much interest to nearfield mastering engineers unless they routinely mike symphony orchestras.


Roy had suggested that one of the telltale signs of true time coherence hides in how the lateral confusion of oversized images and fake halos from lobing and crossover issues shrinks back into the center -- or "stands still" -- to suddenly unlock the front/back domain. I can't vouch for the explanation but most assuredly can for the observation. Just like Jerry Ramsey's Audio Magic conditioners -- particularly the Triple X and Eclipse -- Green Mountain's flagship is the real estate champion of the depth perspective. It sells you on endless vistas and faraway horizons. Not only does the soundstage begin farther behind the speakers than usual, it also ends farther back than anything else I've had through here yet (except for the Gallo Reference 3 which, likely by virtue of similar time alignment and phase fidelity, pulls a similar stunt if you give it adequate breathing room. However, it begins the stage a bit closer behind the speaker).


The only area where one might slightly nitpick the Continuum 3 before thinking is in a minor discontinuity of gestalt between bass and midrange when this speaker is run with the wrong amplifier. Then the bass quality is just a bit bloomier than the drier and resistively loaded midrange whose rear wave encounters a tight sandwich of dissimilar damping layers. The relative emphasis between transient/sustain/decay values seems to slightly shift in favor of decay below the operating band of the Audax Aerogel driver. Once you've got appropriate muscle behind the woofer (which, looking at its size, the size of the box and port, is really common sense), this perceived transition of texture at around 300Hz disappears. The 30 watts of my Audiopax monos was plenty of power but their damping factor wasn't stiff enough to fully control the woofers if you like your bass more chiseled and striated. Me, I prefer it ever so slightly rotund and warm and that's exactly what minor underdamping of the alignment via my tube amps accomplished.


Janet Lynn explained the bass alignment choices as follows: "For the C3, excellent low bass response at soft volumes was a requirement. How to accomplish this? Only an ultra-compliant suspension allows the cone to move on very small signals. The woofer also must have a very low fundamental resonant frequency and a clear response into the mid-band. Ours is the only 12-inch woofer to meet those specifications. The choice of such a low-resonance woofer necessitates a moderately large enclosure (which is why you don't much see woofers like this anymore). A port keeps this type from beating itself to death by having such a compliant suspension. It brings the woofer to a standstill on very low frequency bass, reducing intermodulation distortion up into the voice range, which is how high we asked this woofer to perform. The solution to a musical-sounding ported speaker is to have the port-tuning frequency below most of the musical range and to design the cabinet to be very, very quiet above the port-tuning frequency. The C-3's port tuning is at 34Hz and because of the 'Golden Ratio' baffle inside (our patentable breakthrough), the cabinet is exceptionally quiet above 40Hz."

This gelled perfectly with my earlier observation that the Continuums' bass responsiveness to tiny input voltages is truly extraordinary and a serious boon to low-level listening. So this wasn't by coincidence then? Phat chance. Nothing about this speaker is by coincidence and not the result of very lengthy research and development. (The first adjustable Soundfield Convergence model debuted as early as 1996 while working with cast marble for this firm goes back a full 12 years, to the Diamante shown in Travertine marble above.)


While we're talking facts & figures, consider the highly unusual 1st-order boogie factor. It translates as 110dB peaks at 3 meters, measured at first arrival without room gain. That's unhealthily loud if you're so inclined. Sensitivity is 90dB and impedance 6 ohms +/- 0.75 from 150 to 20,000Hz. An indicator for the audible cleanliness lies in the claimed THD and IMD spec: 0.5% and <1% respectively, both at 105dB/1 meter.


I need to return to the C3s' bass performance if, like me, you're an aficionado of mid-power tube amps and music like Liana's Fado PT or the nouveau electronica Tango of The Gotan Project. They mix sophisticated high-level vocalists (non-sampled!) with massive bass artillery otherwise expected on the dance floor only. Using my self-powered Avantgardes neatly circumvents the usual no-feedback single-ended compromises. Once Gallo's bass amp launches for public consumption, it'll accomplish the same assistance in the nether regions for valve challengers underendowed in these matters. For bass extension and responsiveness, the Green Mountain
speakers need not rely on such schemes. They are thus exceedingly friendly to this type of amplification. It's merely a matter of how quickly, exactly, you want the woofers to stop. In that regard, season to taste with amplifier damping factors. For my taste, the 3.5-ohm output impedance of my tube monoblocks worked perfectly. To put it mildly, that's hellaciously contra indicatory for your usual vented 12" woofer in such a sizeable enclosure.


All of this makes the GMA C3 a very dynamic full-range candidate for tube lovers who want to stay with passive loudspeakers while getting delivery of all the goods promised on their raunchier software. Remember that many loudspeaker manufacturers design according to the current reality where raw amplifier power is cheap. The C3 turns welcome surprise then to those who view such thinking lamentably cheap and couldn't be bothered to stockpile amplifier watts just to drive inefficient speakers with reactive power-hungry networks. Watts may be cheap but good-sounding watts ain't that easy to rustle up.


Generally speaking, apparently insufficient paper power can often elicit plenty of playback volume but the quality-- and not just of the bass -- will suffer to sound sloppy, woolly or a bit indistinct. Mr. Johnson's physical separation of the 'vocal module' undermines any ill effects of less-than-optimal amplifier control in the bass leaking into voices. The high crossover point is so cannily hidden that the worst side effect possible is the injection of a modicum of warmth - and some might argue how calling that a bad side effect is taking liberties. Where all of these observations come together is in something like Miguel Poveda's Zaguan [Harmonia Mundi 987027] which was recorded in a rather wet and reverberant venue.

Especially on the sparser fandangos "Clemencia" which does away with the percussion ensemble of the more heated following bulerias, you can spend many a minute suspended in literal space, marvelling over how this fiery singer plays the acoustics, where he turns away from the microphone, how his voice spills across the walls and bounces back to mix into the direct sounds. Because decays literally die on the air, their relative length is always directly proportional to system noise floor and transducer responsiveness. The latter is the uncontested domain of hornloaded drivers. Even the most subliminal of motions are acoustically amplified by the horns. The Continuum 3 too is a friend of very extended decays, testament to very low cabinet noise floor that doesn't mask those truly tiny signals.


And similar to horns, again, are the apparently accelerated rise times of this speaker which will be especially noticeable on vocal gestures of emphasis. Those will cut through the air like a blade. Unlike traditional Vandersteens (Model 5 excepted) and those Meadowlarks I'm most familiar with, the Continuum 3 is not a warm or slightly plump and forgiving design. It has far more in common with the small cast-resin Star Sound Caravelle I heard in Denver (which, by way of being a two-way, lacked the LF scale of the Green Mountain design).

One of my favorite all-in-one test CDs for piano, orchestral mass, symphonic dynamics and scale is the live Volodos/Levine reading of Rachmaninov's Third and the following solo transcriptions [Sony Classical 64384]. Performance and recording quality are as good as they come. If a speaker has flaws, they'll come to the fore on material like this. The piano might lose its silkiness in the legato interludes or some of the fury in the percussive chord hammerings. The orchestral expanse might get foreshortened. Instrumental lines might clump together and get tangled up. Massed strings could turn hairy. The damper pedal action on the piano might get obscured. The left-handed attacks might seem lightweight. There's a lot that can go wrong.


Because it's a dynamic recording with a lower median output to leave headroom for peaks, I moved my overall system gain to the edge of what it could deliver for completely realistic levels. 30 watts will only do so much if you don't use a high-gain preamp (and my DAC only puts out 1V max to begin with). Shy of unleashing the ultimate mondo rumble, the Continuum 3s sailed through this material without missing a beat and truly excelled in casting the expansive Berlin Philharmonic hall and the precise placement and layering of the orchestral forces. Another really strong point was the height of dynamic crests when the musical fluids grew agitated and turned into giant breakers. For someone used to and in love with the German horns, I didn't find myself marooned in the shallows which, to be honest, tends to be the case when coming off the horns. No, the Continuums weren't their equal but nothing non-horned really is except for the Lowther-based Rethms which lack the weight for a properly fleshed-out tonal balance though they do pull ahead of the Duos in the sheer immediacy stakes. But that's a bit of a bare-ass nekkid showing - flashy and exciting yet flawed without the assistance of a superior subwoofer.


I believe that we've now covered the musical and technical mojo that is Green Mountain Audio's flagship. Despite its current lack of widespread recognition, it's a fully matured, completely detailed-out product that benefits from extensive experience culled from various predecessors extending way back to the company's launch in 1988. Not having seen the optional grill hood in action, I can't comment on its aesthetic success. Ivette is rather tolerant of form-follows-function audiophile excesses if they're sonically convincing. However, she's never one to blunt artistic criticism on appearance issues either. She was surprisingly favorable about the modernistic sculptural aspect on tap here. Like Carl Marchisotto of Alon (now Nola) who's struggled for years with how to visually best implement his open-baffle concept, Roy Johnson has grappled with the same challenge. His other models are more conventional in appearance but for his best effort, he insisted on both the minimum baffle principle and complete adjustability of the head unit's relative position and angle of wave launch.

Sonically speaking, the Continuum 3 has all the ear markings of perhaps being the most radical manifestation yet of transforming the inherent demands of a ne-plus-ultra 1st-order effort into a production speaker model. Like an Arabian race horse with superior reflexes, it's not forgiving of a lazy rider or a mediocre diet. By virtue of being a very benign load, it is amazingly copasetic with zero NFB mid-power valve amplifiers and monstrously well hung in the bass department. Like anything fast and accurate, it's lean and mean. Like the Gallo Reference 3s, it's a space champion of layered depth. Unlike public perceptions of its genre, it'll go louder than legal and needn't be treated with kid's gloves. It seems exceptionally well constructed and though not a home-coming beauty queen, it's got enough domestic acceptability factor to remain true to its racetrack ambitions without getting parked in the garage outa sight, outa sound. First and foremost, it looks at the sonic world without any glasses whatsoever and believes in telling the truth. It poses an interesting conundrum for 1st-order naysayers by not offering anything of true substance to attack or besmirch. That alone doesn't guarantee new converts to the genre but I predict that those who go audition the Continuum 3s will walk away with nothing but undiluted admiration even if fiscal or appearance considerations mean they'll continue looking.

The verdict thus writes itself: The Green Mountain Audio Continuum 3 is a bona fide all-out assault at the time-coherent state-of-the-art. It's Colorado's answer to California's Vandersteen Model 5. Lacking the latter's active bass system, it adds mechanically adjustable time-domain parameters. Though I've tried, I can't really point the finger at anything to complain about. If the C3 is a bit fussier about ancillaries than most, that's merely a reflection on its demanding resolving power. Because it's low distortion in the time, transducer and cabinet domains, it strips away fat, fuzz and fake comfort to become a very serious precision tool that won't lie to please nor dull its blade to protect the unweary. If all of this describes the sign posts of your musical journey, be certain to make the acquaintance of the Continuums. In many ways, they rewrite expectations. Nothing about them isn't seemingly backed by solid science of high-order Physics. And while there's many roads pointing to Rome, not every example of the speaker art traveling down any particular one makes it into the final piazza. Make no mistake, the Continuum 3 does - mission accomplished.


From talking with Roy Johnson, the way this happened was much inspired by his recording work for the Colorado Springs Symphony and sound reinforcement experience. It allowed him to identify certain sonic ingredients that weren't a function of his microphone or recorder choices and thus had to be blamed on additive or distorting speaker behavior. Via a process of elimination against the master tape, his design process over the years continued to subtract those sonic attributes that he knew weren't part of the recording chain. The speaker under review today is an advanced product of this process. It should thus be of particular interest to folks who regularly attend live concerts or, like our own Les Turoczi, are involved in the recording arts of live events to have a true yardstick against which to measure what the Continuum 3 accomplishes. This is one bloody impressive loudspeaker. I can't wait for January's T.H.E. Expo in Las Vegas to learn how Roy Johnson has shrunk it in the new Calypso for those whose wallets are a bit slimmer than the Continuum 3s can accommodate. Green Mountain will apparently host three active rooms. Yousa. I'll be sure to report on this activity in my show report. GMA. Shouldn't that really stand for Grand Master Acoustics? Whatever. Bueno bellissimo!
Green Mountain Audio comments:

Dear Srajan,
It has been a pleasure working with you over these past few weeks as we coordinated the details of our Continuum 3 review. I appreciate that you took the necessary time to uncover those aspects of the Continuum 3 that I hold most dear to the music. The scope of your product and industry knowledge and deep appreciation of a wide range of music made possible a total analysis of all of the speaker's detailed attributes. I am further gratified that you took the time to experience it using different equipment and setups.

I first heard of you through my customers and from other manufacturers. They were right. Your methodologies and perspectives represent the epitome of the art of product reviewing. As I consider you a professional colleague and peer, I am proud that you were the Continuum 3's first reviewer. Were it not for the breadth of your industry experience and prior background as a musician, your complete and thorough Continuum 3 review would have not been possible, nor would it have been as meaningful to me as its designer. To have your validation motivates me to be a better designer and to continue to strive for perfection.

Thank you again for challenging the Continuum 3 to prove itself. I'm glad to know it passed your tests.

Best Regards,

Roy Johnson
Manufacturer's website