Hi Marco, thanks for your reply.

That is interesting regarding your experience of the Red’s lacking bass impact and sounding lean and cold. It certainly wasn’t my experience. I suspect that they differ somewhat given their age and condition. Were yours all original, re-cones, with modern HF diaphrams or….?

I would agree that the Golds sounded to have more bass impact but as you know there are a number of influencing factors. Did you do any measuring as quite often when part of the audio frequency is more audible it affects your impression of the other frequencies? (Ie if there is more bass you perceive there is less treble) They did have upgraded crossovers in them but in hindsight I suspect that they weren’t that well optimised.

For reference I was listening near field, in a small room, and used various power amps along with the Puresound L300. Contrary to my (and others) experience with Golds, you could drive the Reds well from a SE amp, and I tried both with various models including Art Audio Diavolo 300b, AA Concerto with split core output Tx, and a Consonance Cyber 880-2A3.

I decided to keep the AA Concerto (running KT88) and should I have sorted out the Reds then having some 15ohm transformers wound was next on my list.
(There are some Art mono block versions of this amp for sale ATM which I think would be very nice BTW ☺)

I don’t listen to a lot of heavy rock, or much reggae but I do like large scale classical and early drum and bass, which I think is at least/if not more demanding.

Re. the cabs, Im pretty sure they were original and reputedly were the orange formica models that came from a well known studio.
They were heavy but as a large box, made of thin-ish ply they weren’t inert. I’m not implying that the panels were flapping about but that they didn’t sound ‘tight and deep or free’ in the way you describe.



Tom’s GRFs did have less extension, but I found them less coloured and more open/natural sounding. As I think Ive implied they obviously had been through some iterative improvements and I suspect were/are a bit of a one off. If I could of got a ‘perfect’ set of drivers I would have kept them, but by this point it had been around 12 months and I probably had done some 2000+ miles to various ‘experts’ trying to sort them…

I would suggest that there are a number of similarities between Paul’s designs and my T & F RAs. From what I have heard of Paul’s I think they have slightly more dynamic swing, and are more revealing. Whilst the RAs drive off less watts, are more neutral, and have greater extension.