High Efficiency Speaker Asylum: Re: Goto drivers by fulken

I just went to Japan and listened GOTO and ALE horn system. Both sounds far better than other systems I heard (Altec A5 + JBL2405, Avantgard Trio/Duo, TAD). They sounded very natural, and it maked me to forget about â€œlistening to audio systemâ€. It almost felt like sound came out from the space. I think their very fast tangent response is the key for the natural sound. I tried tweeter with smaller (still bigger than usual tweeter) magnet and monster magnet (bigger than JBL375) at both GOTO and ALE. They resulted same, bigger the magnet makes less sharp (unwanted) sound, and sounds more natural. Due to huge/long horns both system cannot have good phase alignment. However the sound image was excellent. I wonder what phase alignment does to the sound! I also have to mention that their bass was super fast and tight. After I listened GOTO and ALE, I listened Duo. I thought Duo had fast mid and high (good horn sound) and somewhat slow bass. Duo sounded like aggressive hi-fi sound. GOTO and ALE had much more musical natural sound. I came home (Nashville, TN) and listened my A5 + JBL2405, it sounds more like Duo. After listening ALE and GOTO, my horn system does not sounds musical (I thought my system was musical..)â€¦

More detail:
I listened GOTO at their distributor, Tanaka Audio Lab in Tokyo, and ALE at their main office in Kanagawa. In same week I stopped by Jazz cafÃ©, Megu that is owned by Yasukuni Terashima who is a famous jazz/audio writer (MJ) in Japan. Megu is famous for having very good sound. GOTOâ€™s system was 3-way horns with 15â€ woofer with GOTOâ€™s custom solid-state amplifiers. ALEâ€™s system is also 3-way horns with 15â€ woofer with transformer coupled tube push-pull amplifiers. Megu uses Avantgarde Duo, and I donâ€™t know about amplifier. GOTO and ALE sounded very similar compared to other horn systems. GOTO has much tighter sound than ALE. I think this is due to solid-state with GOTO and tube with ALE system. Biggest difference was that sweet listening spot for GOTO was much bigger than ALE. When I move my head around with GOTO system, sound image does not change much as ALE. ALE system sounded softer than GOTO. If I listen very long hours, I prefer ALE system. If I cannot sit stand still (listen while doing other things), I prefer GOTO system. Both systems have totally different system setup, so I cannot compare apple to apple. However both systems had far better musical sound than Duo and A5+JBL2405.