Instead, the Duo GT seeks to trump such ‘cosmetic niceties’ with its sheer presence and musical substance. Recreate the original event? Why bother when you can re-live it? In a fit of nostalgia I pulled out the PG-era Genesis masterwork Foxtrot and the track ‘Supper’s Ready’. The murky mix and multi-layered pomp-rock sprawl is a challenge to any system, but it’s a challenge that the Duos met with a majestic display of power and grace. So much so that I couldn’t resist simply flipping the disc and playing the first side, before repeating the second once again. Which is kind of the whole point. It’s no surprise that so many of the musical examples I have cited here are live or concert performances – or discs which preserve that sense of performance. What this speaker demands of its listeners is a clear sense of musical priorities. Are you in this for the gear or the music? If it’s the gear, then the Duo will likely prove a frustrating choice. But if you want musical access – and musical access to the widest possible range of recordings, from modern audiophile discs to collectible original pressings, from discs you’ve just discovered to the ones that you partied at college – then I can’t propose a more musically or cost effective solution at anything like this price level than the Duo GT.
This latest evolution of a design that originated 30-years ago is a powerful advocate for the targeted application of technological solutions. It takes its spherical horns and active bass and binds them together with thoughtful refinements and a radical electronics solution (the iTron current drive) to create a whole that’s even greater than the considerable sum of its parts. To combine these technologies and deliver this level of performance at this price is a remarkable achievement, the result of clarity of purpose and innovative thinking married to engineering excellence. You’d think that it would be a slam-dunk success – but this is the world of audio, where conservative is spelt with a lower-case c (but all the other letters are capitals). The Duo GT challenges convention and slays it convincingly, but just like the dragons of old, those conventions linger long in the collective memory – and longer still in terms of market inertia.
There are few arguments to counter the theoretical and demonstrable superiority of a well-executed active crossover. Passive networks are subtractive by their very nature. They place a barrier between the amplifier and the drive-units it’s trying to control, and risk a corresponding barrier between the listener and the original event. Embrace the complexity (and cost) of an active crossover and the multiple amplifiersthat go with it and you end up with a superior signal path, as well as sidestepping the most critical (amplifier/speaker) interface in the system. To add to the advantages of direct coupling your amplifiers to your drivers, the Duo GT offers the added advantages of high sensitivity and the superior dynamic tracking and accuracy of current drive. It’s really no surprise that the complete package redefines wide-bandwidth dynamic capabilities and micro-dynamic definition at anything even close to its price.
