About GT Audio Works

I have had a passion for building speakers since I was in my early 20’s, 30 years later I started GTAW. Over those 30 years, I built all types of speakers , eventually settling on the magnetic planar/ribbon dipole as my favorite.

While I enjoyed owning most of the planar magnetic and electrostatic speakers made at the time, in my opinion they each had their strong and weak points. After years of building and listening and rebuilding and more listening, I came upon the idea of my full range planar driver. The GTA3R is the full realization of that idea.

I designed the GTA3R planar driver to operate full range, no crossover, directly wired to the amp. Why do I believe this so important?

Consider what a crossover does. It takes the full range music signal, segments it and contours each segment to feed multiple drivers, each designed to reproduce a portion of the music signal.

My biggest issue with this approach is, our ears and brain are very adept at deciphering very minuscule difference in sound, especially in the critical midrange. Breaking this critical range up and reproducing it with 2 or more drivers of different materials and accompanying electrical delay creates a discrepancy we may not notice at first, but after extended listening, you know something is not right.

The GTA3R planar driver is adept at reproducing a large piece of the music signal from 40 hz to 6khz, it is intimately coupled with your amplifier to reproduce every nuance of the music signal your amp provides. None of the distortions and power robbing issues associated with crossovers.

To use an apt analogy…..consider speaking to someone in your native language, there is a direct understanding of the conversation. Now consider speaking to someone through a translator, you will get the general idea of the conversation, but you will be not be hearing the speakers intended message, only the translators approximation of that message. The conversation will not flow naturally, it will be choppy by the nature of everything being filtered through he translator.

If you were listening only to acoustic music, the planar driver may satisfy you on its own.

But we want our speakers to reproduce all kinds of music.

The GTA3R’s ribbon tweeter is designed with a simple series capacitor 1st order crossover network which is the most phase coherent way to do it. The tweeter is designed to blend in the top octave of the music with as little misinterpretation as possible. Together they make for a full range listening experience that can start, stop and turn on a dime, while resolving every nuance of the music.

Add an open baffle sub woofer and you will turn a very dynamic planar/ribbon speaker into a monster. Pipe organ ? Rock concerts at live levels that sock you in the stomach?

Just sit back and and listen to your favorite piece of music, immersed in the visceral experience like few speaker systems can replicate.