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Our Bulgarian everything but boxes arrived very safely triple-boxed, with the final goods enveloped in a form-hugging non-scratchy cloth liner to protect the finish. Admiring the Luna II up close would have any lover of curves at hard attention. Particularly how the dishy baffle scoops out the mid/woofer is a neat visual feature which doubles as very minor horn loading.
RWA-modded Astell & Kern AK100 via AudioQuest's top glass-fiber Toslink into Gato Audio's excellent DIA-250.
Pictures actually don't quite communicate the full effect of finally seeing these in the flesh. To get the tweeter fully on my ear axis in the nearfield merely meant elevating the front spike with a cork/rubber riser.


EBTB's sculpted baffle also neatly conceals the usual driver fasteners and basket rims. The absence of visible bolts and put-together hardware adds to the overall organic appearance. This is definitely an object d'art I expect you'd not tire of caressing with your eyes each day.

Here is the finely etched globe logo on the very spot where a curly tail would be were this a piglet.

Trading places directly from out of the cold with my usual Gallo Strada 2 made for no obvious sonic holes, gaps, subwoofer adjustments or coarse telltale signs of port loading. There was little of that typical hollow bloated ringing which the Gallos always expose so mercilessly by contrast. The Luna simply wasn't quite as timing tensioned or transient prickly to handle attacks a little gentler. Having bundled my yellow/green Terra III with a small electronics stack for a friend in need of a working hifi, I no longer could A/B the Luna II with its twice-priced elder. I strongly suspected that the Terra would struggle to assert rigorous supremacy over its updated sibling. There was reason after all why the Strada II had usurped the place previously occupied by the Terra III. The Luna II meanwhile seemed to fill that slot pretty well.


With a quasi 2-for-1 deal at work, this EBTB model struck me as a potential 90 percenter for folks to whom Gallo's sticker is out of reach. That was merely a first impression of course. Experienced listeners simply know just how close such first impressions tend to get. Time to build in a safety net with proper burn-in hours. A day later already I had to turn down the sub a bit and also move its low-pass downward to avoid dominance. Another two days later the sub's output had to be cut once more as the Wavecor came fully into its own. The last thing to do now was borrow a set of dense-foam port plugs from my loaner Amphion Ion+ to perfectly match the sub's highly damped textures of the first 1.5 octaves. Without them the transition zone betrayed a slight textural discontinuity particularly at friskier levels, being a bit plumper and looser above and dryer tauter below.


With break-in and small system adjustments made, the primary distinction between Terra II and Strada II now was the latter's greater top-end energy from far higher surface area and deliberate 180° dispersion. This made for even greater image specificity and ambient detail. On their own, subwoofer to zero, the Bulgarians were more bass extended if also fatter than the Americans. Soundstage continuity and scale were similarly impressive. Nails-on-glass timing exactitude was a close second and still deftly in the pocket with hair raising stuff like Angelo Debarre and Marius Apostol's Complicité and its two bullet-train tracks highlighting the Romanian cymbalom wizard Kosty Lakatus. Unless you're a very serious desktop listener, this level of excellence went beyond the call of duty to merit moving into the big system.