GALLO REFERENCE 3 UPGRADE STANDS
OWNER’S MANUAL
PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN??
The Gallo Upgrade Stands are designed to improve on the factory stands in five ways:
1. Provide a much wider, stabler base to prevent the softening of bass impact caused by rocking of the Reference 3 on its narrow factory base.
2. Drain vibrational energy cleanly and efficiently out of the body of the Reference 3 down into the Upgrade maple base, the sink that receives and dissipates that energy. The energy is transmitted via four brass-mounting studs (brass is the best sounding transmission link) that tension the speaker body down against our maple base. To further enhance clean transfer of energy, the speaker body only contacts the maple via four specially shaped brass spacer washers to ensure a minimal contact area. Transferring vibrational energy across large, low pressure contact areas always leads to reflections and micro-rattles at the interface, in turn leading to serious smearing of the midrange and treble.
3. Upgrade the Reference 3 base to an eight times more massive sink for receiving and dissipating the speaker vibrations, one made of air-dried old growth maple—the best-sounding sink material we have tested to date.
4. Improve the speaker’s coupling to the floor using much more massive footers of both better shape and far better sounding material (brass). The standard Reference 3 footers will not penetrate carpet; the lack of rigid coupling to the floor leads to disappointingly muddy bass.
5. For better time alignment, increase the tilt angle of the speaker. The factory tilt angle gives optimum time alignment only for listeners sitting on or very near the floor. Our improved time alignment gives crisper transients and noticeably better image focus.
ASSEMBLY
1. Place the speaker on its side on a sturdy chair with the base hanging over the side of the chair.
2. Remove the old base by unscrewing its six mounting screws.
3. Take four of the long brass threaded studs we provide and screw them into the four corner mounting holes (ignore the center two holes because using them harms the vibration transfer and the speaker’s sound). If necessary, grip the studs with a cloth and use pliers to screw them in.
4. Place one of the contoured washers on each stud with the concave side upwards toward the speaker enclosure (i.e., so it “catches rain”).
5. Fit the maple base over the four studs. The front of the base is the edge closest to the holes.
6. Use a brass washer and a nut on the bottom of the maple base to tighten down each stud. Tighten just enough so that you can’t feel any rocking of the speaker on the stand. Further tightening will cause the speaker to sound slightly dead and over damped.
7. Screw on the brass footers, large ones in front, and small ones in back. As with the studs, do not over tighten. The footer should be just slightly more than finger tight.
8. After a month, check the tightness of the footers and the four mounting studs. The maple generally compresses slightly, thereby requiring retightening. After the first month, check tightness every six months or so.
SET-UP
1. On carpeted floors, after placing the speaker, stomp on the stand with your full weight over each footer in order to make sure that the point penetrates the carpet and solidly contacts the floor beneath. On either carpeted or bare floors, make sure that four feet contact equally so that there is zero rocking. If the speaker rocks along one of the two diagonal axis between footers, you will need to extend (heighten) the back footer of that diagonal. Unscrew the footer until the rocking stops. If you go too far, the speaker will start rocking on the opposite diagonal.
2. When you have finished all the other set-up steps, you should do a final footer height setting using brass shims (small brass washers or, for thicker shims, brass nuts will do fine) at three equally spaced points (120 degrees apart) on the circumference of the footer—shims thick enough to fill the gap created by the extended footer. Use shims slightly too thick and tighten the footer enough to grip the shims. The idea is to make sure the footer is not supported only by the mounting screw threads (these are never rigid enough and form a poor vibration transfer path); instead, the three shim points fully support the outside of the footer to give far better rigidity.
3. Although the Gallo 3.1 speakers are more than powerful enough to easily fill a 30 by 20 foot room with sound, we recommend that, even in such a large room, you place each speaker 5 feet from your ear with 7 feet between them. Like almost all speakers, at 5 feet they sound stunningly better than at 8 or 10 feet.
4. If you have a dedicated listening room, then the optimum arrangement is with your listening chair or sofa backed up against the center of the long wall, again with the speaker 5 feet from your ear and 7 feet apart. This arrangement gives superbly even bass reinforcement, solves most standing wave “room boom” problems far better than tube traps, and gives a huge soundstage with greatly increased depth. If the bass reinforcement is too powerful, move your listening position forward 6 inches at a time. If the wall behind is hard and gives a little excess brightness, use a thin cotton sheet or thin drape or a flat-weave rug (e.g. a kelim or a native American hand weave).
5. For a seamless top-to-bottom tonal balance, the Gallos need to be pointed almost directly at your ear, but with just a sliver of the subwoofer cone visible from your seating position. The more you see of the subwoofer cone, the more lower midrange/upper bass you’ll hear—the effect is just like a tone control. If you see more of the subwoofer cone (i.e., speaker pointed at your ear), you will hear a slight suck out or disconnect between the upper bass and lower midrange. If you’re seeing too much of the cone, the bottom octave of male voices, tenor saxes and trombones will get slightly muddy and thick.
6. It is important to compare the sound of the subwoofers facing out and facing in. In 3 out of 4 rooms, the subwoofer facing out yields cleaner bass. Unfortunately, there is no way of using the room configuration to predict which one will sound better.
