CES and T.H.E. Show 2001
Special Report
by Paul Bolin
The Alón room held perhaps the single most impressive audio component I have ever heard. Judgments made on the basis of hearing a product in a show setting must always be tempered, but even so, the Alón Exotica Grand Reference's four eight-foot towers are something well out of the ordinary, or even the extraordinary. Carl Marchisotto's ultimate statement speaker is a Paul Bunyan-sized expansion of concepts first used in the affordable Exotica, but each of the EGR's main towers use four of the smaller speakers' eight-inch woofers as mid-woofers, six 5½-inch midrange drivers, and nine four-inch ribbon tweeters. The matching ported woofer towers each use four custom-made long-throw 12-inch drivers and a specially designed active crossover assigns frequencies to the proper destination. Marchisotto told me, only half in jest, that the Grand Reference will pass anything from DC to 45kHz, and is effectively flat down to 16Hz. Suffice it to say that when he played the dinosaur stomps from the Jurassic Park soundtrack, my head literally spun (and the ficus trees in the room blew in the breeze) from the levels of infrasonic energy the system produced. In more musical terms, the super-Exotica sailed effortlessly through some of the most demanding sonic torture tests imaginable, including "The Gates of Dafos" and a remarkable recording of full-tilt soprano accompanied by a very large pipe organ. Driven on the bottom by an old, but potent pair of Krell monoblocks (the only amps to which Marchisotto had ready access that could handle the bass towers' 1 ohm impedance) and VTL MB-750 References (run in triode mode) on top, the mammoth Alóns present life-sized images on a life-sized stage with genuinely lifelike dynamics and seemed completely unimpeachable in timbral quality. While the Grand Reference costs as much as a house ($120,000), if any speaker system can justify such a price, this is the one. Now where did I put those lottery tickets?
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