Thanks for the comments and compliments guys!
Lou- the parts we use are stated on our miniscule website, and as Tennis Junky said- an Aurasound woofer (not fancy looking- resembles an old ADS woofer), a Morel dome, a SonicCap capacitor for the tweeter and a Solen Litz-wire inductor for the woofer. There are a couple of high-voltage Solens in the drivers' voice-coil Zobel networks. That's it. And yes- resistors are high-power, non-inductive wirewounds in ceramic blocks.
These parts produce the best sound for our purposes. We have tried all the other parts you mentioned and more. While excellent choices, they had sonic flavors I could not balance against the rest of the variables in the Europa. We also keep listening, to take advantage of "better" parts asap.
Thanks again for all the feedback. Keep on listening!
Best regards,
Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio
PS:
Lou- the "ultimate SPL" really depends on the music. At ten feet away, on highly compressed rock, you would not want to exceed ~98dB (midband energies) on an average-reading SPL meter like Radio Shack's- so you don't burn them up.
Yet on the very best recordings, we have measured 105dB+ peak SPL on voice, piano, horns, snare drum whacks, picked notes on electric guitar and banjo, on decent peak-storing digital SPL meters. This was at 11-12 feet away in stereo, right at the transition from nearfield to farfield acoustics, in a moderately-dead room with a 9 foot suspended ceiling and cement slab floor under office carpet.
There was no apparent distortion, time and again, with professional classical musicians listening. Since our altitude is 6500 feet, that 105+dB becomes 108+dB at sea level. We also also talking about these peaks as being brief flickers of un-clipped, non-slew-rate-limited high power, and not the sustained notes from electric-guitar solos. We need 200W+ (8 Ohms) here to safely do this, and so at sea level, that would be an amp with 120W/channel (8 Ohm rating)- the Europa is a 4 Ohm speaker. And if you do that all afternoon- you'll soon need new tweeter diaphragms.
Of course, race your sports car- you'll buy new tires and race again!
Am I advocating high power for the Europas? No- just telling you the benefits. I have been plenty pleased spending most of the time well under 20W (8 Ohm) peak- as do most owners.
The point is to make a speaker that can deal with any music you want to play, with any recording quality, and which works well with most any electronics without exaggerating (distorting) their distortions.
