Reference 3A Grand Veena updated mid drivers (whizzer cones) & high end TTSoundPoints

Pair of Reference 3A Grand Veena Loudspeaker These are the sought after 3A series – in High Gloss Cheery Original Price $ 8000.00 Plus TTSoundPoints $ 699.00 (incredible bass improvement super fast and well textured) Excerpts from a review By Phil Gold The Grand Veena can stand comparison with any speaker I know, and will bring you close to the emotional heart of whatever type of music you hold dear. It achieves this by projecting a stable coherent image full of detail and color. And it’ll do this equally happily with any high quality amp, low or high powered, tube or transistor based. You won’t need to break the bank on massive monoblocks. True to its lineage and the result of a great deal of clear thinking, this is another winner for Reference 3A. Altogether, the Grand Veena represents a high achievement for a small Canadian company. No wonder the Canadian dollar is doing so well. I’m not here to tell you what to buy. I’ll just say that if you are considering new speakers for a high-end system in a big listening room and the price ($7,990) doesn’t put you off (it shouldn’t), go audition a pair of Grand Veenas. Tell them I sent you. I say this even if you can afford to spend thirty or forty grand. Design Essentials The Grand Veena is based on the successful two-driver Veena speaker which Ron Nagle enjoyed immensely in June of 2006 (reviewed here). Tash and his colleagues wanted to build on the excellent performance of the $3000 Veena, creating a speaker suitable for much larger rooms. This would offer extended bandwidth and higher maximum volumes For the Grand Veena, Reference 3A retains the directly driven midrange driver with its hyper-exponential woven carbon fiber cone and the 1" tweeter with its single capacitor. This capacitor here is from Mundorf’s Supreme series which features silver foil in oil. Above the tweeter you’ll find an exotic Murata Exciter. You can’t hear those high frequencies directly, but in testing the designers could clearly hear the benefits of including this Exciter in terms of imaging and definition. The Murata unit contains a 12mm gold coated ceramic dome which expands and contracts in a range from 20kHz to 100kHz using a spherical rather than pistonic motion, for optimal dispersion. This Exciter is also directly connected to the amplifier. Below the midrange driver Reference 3A use two identical 8-inch woofers. These long-throw bass drivers feature very stiff and light cones formed in a honeycomb construction made from Fiberglass and Kevlar. An internal acoustic device absorbs excess pressure from the enclosure’s standing waves to avoid interference with the diver’s motion. A simple phase coherent quasi second-order low pass filter shapes the frequency response that is flat to 36 Hz falling smoothly to 15dB down at 20Hz. The main driver is capable of deep bass as in the Veena but here the low frequency performance is curtailed by the shape of the enclosure behind the driver to produce a 3dB roll-off starting at 95Hz. The drivers are offset to avoid diffraction effects and are aligned so the sound from each driver arrives at the listener’s ear at the same time. The cabinet uses high-density fiberboard (HDF) as well as the more common MDF. Faces are made from unequal thicknesses of HDF so that they have different resonant frequencies, while the internal braces and the bottom employ MDF for its slightly greater rigidity. If you open up the cabinet you’ll find a vertical brace and a cross brace at the base of the speaker and you’ll see perforations in the slats of wood designed to reduce resonance. Further internal damping is achieved by the use of AVM fluid coating on the voice coils and on the skirt and centre of the cones. This coating is also applied to the solder and capacitors. Van Den Hul copper / carbon hybrid cable is used to connect the midrange driver and the tweeters, while the bass drivers use silver coated copper cable, also from Van Den Hul. Bybee Quantum Purifiers are connected internally on the tweeter and midrange drivers. There is a lot of expensive parts in these boxes. The rear port is actually an elbow, which releases pressure in a more linear fashion than the straight variety and is carefully located at the acoustic centre of the speaker. The Grand Veena is 51 inches in height and weighs 75 lbs. It sits on three stabilizers with spikes to couple rigidly to the floorboards.