What's A'Diva Ti? Well, they sound great

Me? I'm not much of an audio nut anymore. Used to be. I had to have the latest and greatest speakers and receivers, and I'm sure my salesman, Lonnie Clark of Audio/Video on Independence (now Tweeter and not on Indy anymore) probably loved me for it. I'm sure I helped send his daughter to school.



Now I'm a video nut. I love to go to Best Buy and Tweeter and Circuit City to look at all the flat-panel LCD and plasma TVs (another discussion for another day), so when I got a set of Anthony Gallo speakers, I didn't have high expectations. I mean, I didn't know who Anthony Gallo was.

So of course, I google him and turns out the line of speakers he makes is quite well thought of. The A'Diva Ti 5-speaker system I was given to test has received rave reviews from a lot of fancy audiophile magazines.

Me? I think they're going to way too expensive to tell you all about. At just under $2,000, they're not exactly the $500 system you can get at Best Buy, but you can easily spend more than that on one set of speakers at Best Buy's fantastic Magnolia store in Concord, and at least to my ears, you still won't have a speaker set as grand as this. These are speakers you can grow old with.

Out of the box, you get five space-age looking speakers and a killer subwoofer. The silver round speakers, which kind of look like a giant eyeball, can be placed in-wall, in-ceiling or using more traditional methods, including placing them on stands which are included.

The 10-inch subwoofer has a 250-watt amp and will literally shake your walls. You can run the speakers through the amp or through an outboard receiver, the way I tried them. After letting them warm up for 50 hours, per Gallo's suggestion, I noticed the speakers sounding better than they did out of the box, and I was blown away out of the box.

They shined on video surround mode, making "Batman Begins" sound better than in my area multiplex. They handled DVD Audio and Super Audio CD, delivering quality I didn't think my receiver and DVD player were capable of outputting (I can only imagine these speakers paired with a dynamic receiver and DVD).

I let a friend, Winfred Cross, try the speakers. He writes about audio equipment for several online and print publications and I consider him about as much an expert in the field as you'll find in Charlotte.

He says, "These can handle anything you give them. Bass can be set with no boost or 3db or 6db increases. My neighbors appreciated the flat setting best.
You can find more expensive systems that sound better or you can put together your own, maybe for the same price. But why bother? Anthony Gallo Acoustics has done all the work to provide a system of outstanding clarity and quality. This is a no brainer."

These are available online at roundsound.com -- with a 30-day free in-home trial -- or at two Gastonia dealers, The Audio Shop and Alarm Sound.