Heard these at a private demo yesterday. marten Mingus quintet 2 statement edition (not the catchiest name).
Not sure they’re worth £76,000 but they did sound pretty flawless. Clean, linear, open, with superb bass impact down to the lowest octaves. Superb out of box imaging and as far as I could detect, no real sonic downsides.
The Gryphon amp running 160w class A, was almost too hot to touch!!
Technics SL 1000R was also wonderful to use!
Oh, I’d seen something about a Gryphon + Marten tour happening, was this one of those events?
yeah i believe so… though “the sound counsel” will have this as their static system for some time, they plan to do variations around it, of different pre’s and phono stages etc.
With the caveat this was yesterday I got the chance to spend some time at Chris’s @Rab1991 place listening to these -
Chris got a lot of plaudits at the Mav show and more than a few people said they were the best sounding at the show - in short I can see why!
These are casually plonked into the corners and the horn and tweeter very roughly positioned, and yet they sounded utterly glorious. While there may be some things that can be tweaked and further refined they’re still in the grand scheme of things some of the very best sounding speakers I’ve ever heard.
The sheer speed and immediacy of the horns is something else. Chris has done a fantastic job putting these together and there is still more to come from them.
Bravo Chris, fabulous job 
Yeah they were impressive at the Mav show, made music ‘an event’.
Bravo .
Chapeau, Chris. A fine effort.
Seems like you totally aced it Chris @Rab1991 Not bad for a knock up effort eh ? 
A lot of luck was involved!
Like mentioned by wayne, still loads of tweaking but trying not to loose the energy that they have. The dynamics and speed in the mids is really the magic and make them so engaging to listen to. you can sit and pick flaws with them but it almost doesn’t matter as they just make music with life sized images.
Maybe a pair of w onken next, extra pair of bass drivers in parallel to increase efficiency, take some of the padding down away from the tweeters and mids. Then to find a pair of 803b instead of the 805b horns to get the compression drivers playing a little bit lower.
Wouldn’t want to risk destroying that, if it were me.
I’ll be keeping them as they are as a go back to this point and any new bits probably just start a whole new crossover
The Stax Studio’s Altec Power Head - not very good pics sadly but in my defence I was in a bit of a daze walking around the place.
Yep that’s a great summary of where they’re at.
I’d just add that in terms of flaws, we really are nitpicking in pursuit of the ultimate.
What Chris has done for a really minimum outlay is go right to the top floor of how real speakers can sound. What you get is that palpable weighty sound with some of the best dynamic swings I’ve heard full stop. They are so far above every single cat coffin I’ve heard and perform at the level of the best horns too.
Improvements are possible in the bass but some of that is the in room reaction. Chris could also actively power LF and I imagine that would yield more improvements.
There’s a slight shade of forwardness but the horns and the tweeter could be time aligned and positioned more precisely and give a teeny bit more. And then there’s the scope to throw a lot of foo at the crossovers.
All of this is chasing the last few percent. Honestly, if most people had sound reproduction like this in their room I suspect they would be very happy indeed.
That will be the downside
One of them.
didn’t seem to be. Had quite an authoritive presence, even at high volume.
