GNP Loudspeakers, anyone familiar with them?


I have a pair of GNP speakers but I can't find any info about them. They have three separate cabinets for the woofers, midrange and tweeter with an adjustment on the back of the tweeter for the mid and HF levels. The cabinets are connected with heavy duty gold spade end cables.
Dennis
jay_north

Showing 1 response by tafka_steve

If the upper bass and midrange/tweeter modules fit together to form a triangle (front profile) with rounded corners, you probably have their top model, the Valkyrie. There were at least four versions of this speaker, the last retailing for $2295/pr in 1990. The upper bass/midrange module featured an internal Lead Cylinder construction with the "Cone of Silence" to kill rear wave reflections. The bass section had a sealed enclosure with a pair of 6.5" woofers. All crossovers were parallel, first-order, for phase coherence. The bass was very tight, but not very extended and without much slam (the chosen tradeoff against going with a bass reflex design with larger woofers).

Stereophile reviewed the Valkyrie, as did IAR, and possibly TAS (sorry, I'm can't recall the issues, but none of them were rave reviews). When I auditioned them at GNP's Pasadena store, I admired their cleanless, their imaging and focus, and smooth, forgiving delivery (think Vandersteen-like), but felt that they were exceeded by other designs in lively dynamics, bandwidth extention, and low level detail. The cloth dome tweeter and midrange units are probably dated relative to modern designs. Still, it'd take a Vandy 2CE to beat it these days.