No shortage of big hitters
One has to wonder how Cessaro can sound so lacking demoing the Gammas at Munich Show, and so stellar demoing the Carmen at AE Show
Maybe where AE have the edge is getting the difference w attention to acoustics, pwr and grounding
Hello,
I own a pair of Cessero Gamma II. The first two months having them, they did not sound as good as my previous YG Sonja. It also did not sound as good as the Beta II (smaller lower model Cessaro) with just an integrated and a cd player at my agent's place. I was miserable. It was like holy crap I bought an Aventador but it ran like a BMW i8.
What was the problem? These horns are so damn HEAVY. About two tons. Ralph, the designer and owner of Cessaro, was only with me for a day and a half installing the things. It took one whole day just to move the horns out from the crates into my listening room. You need a linebacker to move the speaker an inche to the side. To really get them to sing, the placement of these horns is extremely crucial. Each place is different. Room size, shape, acoustics all substantially matter. It took me six months to get these 8 foot tall horns completely disappeared without smearing bass. My room is L-shape with glass walls on two sides. I had to redo my room acoustics having a sound engineer do the inroom frequency analysises and kept adjusting speakers and the room over and over. The phase and crossover point of the horns and subs had to be corrected. Good things these speakers has buttons for adjustability. Now, if you listen to my Cessaro, you will only hear music. Of course, these are not just the tweaks I had to do. Good sources, preamp, amps also need to be very good and tuned to match one another. I am lucky to become friend with Gerhard the owner of Ayon. So he came to tweak his gears that I use every time he came to Bangkok.
Why did Cessaro suck at Munich. Apart from room acoustic and limited time they had installing the system, I truely believe it was because 1) dirty power 2) grounding. I dare say you never gonna get the Cessaro or any speakers or system to sound like AE or mine (haha) unless you have clean power and good grounding management. To be honest I lost a lot of money going AE's approach in cleaning power but I got excellent results managing grounding using their Tripoint products. I even have these rediculous wrist-size grounding cables that my wife give me a look of pity everytime she sees them.
I value realism in sound most from a system. I wish they come cheap but they dont (not only cheap in term of money but also efforts)....ask Mr.Lavigne or Mr.Airbearing or Mr. Audiocrack or Mr.Karmeli who even goes to the point of unobtainum on certain gears. Some rediculosly expensive approaches from AE do work for me although many raves of their products sound or tone like dialogs in Fast and Furious. With my limited time and selected priority I couldnt find cheaper way. AE offer alternatives for those search for even small delta of sound improvements at high price. Reasonable? No. But the same goes to buying a $100,000 Patek Philippe. It's a hobby.
Kind regareds,
Tang
I sat next to him at a RMAF Dinner--could'nt get a word in edgeways-ha! 
