Anthony then moved on to working with ribbons; "I took apart an old radar tube called a magnetron. A magnetron has about thirty pounds of Alnico V. After removing this huge magnet I started using it as the basic magnetic circuit for my ribbon designs". Once again he was hooked on their speed and transparency but "they were very hard to drive and limited in dynamic range, not to mention the myriad of cavitational resonances created by the pole pieces and various reflective distortions. By that point I was determined to continue on my search for the Holy Grail of tweeters. I started buying every dome available in the US but none even came close to satisfying me".

Then, in the early 1980's an electronics magazine issued an article talking about the uses of Piezo film and the potential for audio applications. "I threw the magazine aside for a few years but in the back of my mind I knew that I would some day work with this material".

In 1987 the first version of the CDT™ (cylindrical diaphragm transducer) was born. It took nine years of research and development to get the CDT™ to its current status. During that time Anthony worked for Panasonic where he was a commercial video engineer. He also started and ran a thriving video repair business, "I ended up selling the business along with my cars and everything else I owned to continue research on the Nucleus and various patent expenses."

As the months passed Gary would call Anthony and offer him business and marketing advice when he called to see when his speakers would be ready. It became apparent one day that Anthony had run out of money to continue his research and bring the Nucleus to market. He told Gary that he had considered placing an advertisement looking for an investor. "I asked Anthony why he did not ask me to invest. He told me he that since I had my own business he didn't think I would be interested. I decided at that very moment that I would invest in this technology and devote half of my time to forming a speaker company with Anthony". Gary eventually had to give up his original business as Gallo Acoustics took over all of his time.

As Gary tells it, the progression of events is summarised as follows: "We began by working together literally at the living room table. We listened to the behemoth Nucleus, which looked sort of like a Watt Puppy on steroids, and dreamed about ways to deliver what we were hearing to the world. It was around that time that we hit on the spherical concept. You know, you always hear stories about companies that start out in a garage or a basement, for us, it was a big deal when we were able to rent out the basement of Anthony's brownstone in Brooklyn, NY and just get out of the living room! We moved into the basement, mind you it is a 100+ year old building, and the dust down there was deep enough to ski on. There was also an old coal shoot, we liked that, and a boiler that broiled us all summer and put out enough fumes to do permanent damage all winter. This is one of those basements that have the hinged steel doors on the sidewalk. You had to open them up and climb down these steep mouldy steps just to get down there. Whatever was on the sidewalk, rain, snow etc., would seep into our lab, it was a real challenge. If you forgot to duck on the way down your head hit the steel trap door. In any case, we built some work benches and we were off building the first generation of Nucleus. It did not take long for us to gain critical acclaim for our sound at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other trade shows. It did take time to get people to accept a large sphere in their living room. It was probably a year and a half down there before we rented a studio apartment around the corner.

That was to become our offices, manufacturing, research and listening room space. Needless to say you had to move lots of boxes to find my desk, which was located in what used to be the kitchen. There was so little space that we had to store packaging at my apartment and make van trips whenever we ran out. It was there that we switched from the polyethylene cabinet to the spun aluminium one. We felt that we could gain market acceptance if the product looked ultra modern. If it had to be bizarre looking at least make it ultramodern so it had a chance.

We came up with some prototypes and called Don in to New York to discuss strategy. He took one look at the Micro prototype and said "we are sitting on a fortune". The decision was made shortly thereafter to halt everything and focus all of our energy and resources on the Micro. We always knew we could bring back the expensive gear later. It also fulfilled Anthony's lifelong goal of a high end speaker that everyone could afford. I was happy to be making a speaker my friends could finally afford. As the Micro began to take off, we opened up the facility in Los Angeles. This gave us the ability to do research in Brooklyn and also ship to the East Coast from there. We could also take advantage of the good weather, inexpensive warehousing and extensive manufacturing base on the West Coast.

In 1999 the Nucleus Micro was launched to great critical and commercial acclaim, the 'Micro' was joined by our flagship Dué speaker in 2002 and then by the 5" A'Diva in early 2003.

Anthony Gallo Acoustics products are now sold in over 40 countries worldwide.

Since 1994, we've heard our speakers described as "breathtaking", "futuristic", and "strange." But whether you think our cosmetics are stunning or bizarre isn't really important to us. Everything we do is judged according to a single, simple goal - achieving the highest fidelity possible. It would have been much easier for us to design and build a traditional box-type enclosure with conventional drivers. But why would we? A number of fine companies already offer these products. We know how to build such speakers, and how to make them look beautiful, but they could never have delivered the type of performance we demanded. In our attempts to advance the state of the loudspeaker art, a fresh approach was needed.

Despite their numerous shortcomings - low efficiency, large size, compromised bass and volume output - planar loudspeakers were long prized by audiophiles for their "boxless" sound. Therefore, our first challenge was to eliminate the two major causes of box coloration's, namely, enclosure resonance and baffle diffraction.

Before we could define the future of loudspeaker design, we had to reach into the past. Back in the 1940's, Olsen realised that a spherical enclosure provided, by far, the most linear frequency response, the lowest diffraction and absolute elimination of resonance-generating internal standing waves. In order to deliver boxless sound from a dynamic driver, we eliminated the box.

As described above, we have taken great pains to eliminate the sonic signature of the enclosure. Still, any cabinet - even ours - will generate some vibration. Therefore, our spherical bass module was not only designed to minimise resonance, but to prevent the remainder from interfering with the music.

In a conventional enclosure design, resonances are controlled by bracing the interior, thickening the walls and adding damping materials. Unfortunately, these techniques also add mass. The cabinet stores this mechanical energy much like a capacitor stores an electrical charge, and releases them out of phase with the music signal. The inevitable result is a blurring of subtle details. By contrast, the Nucleus spherical bass module not only eliminates internal standing waves, but due to its ultra-light construction, reduces energy storage to insignificant levels.

Compared with any other dynamic loudspeaker, the Nucleus series provides greater inter transient silence, and a more complete rendering of fine harmonic and tonal information.

No crossover is the best crossover
In all multi-driver loudspeakers, the woofer, tweeter and midrange must be blended for smooth response. Designers routinely accomplish this task with complex filter networks known as crossovers. Unfortunately, even the best of these circuits introduce phase and time distortions, and force the delicate music signal to pass through a host of electrical components. Once again, Anthony Gallo has developed a superior solution.

Through rigourous selection and treatment of the woofer, in conjunction with a tweeter which rejects low frequencies, Nucleus series loudspeakers deliver smooth, linear output without a crossover. In fact, only a short piece of high quality wire stands between each binding post and woofer solder tab - the simplest signal path possible! For the first time, the seamless purity of the best full-range electrostatics is available in a small, efficient and highly dynamic package.

The Micro accomplishes this task with a similarly elegant solution. Utilising our patent pending S2 technology, the Micro can use only a single full range driver to cover the entire frequency range from 100 Hz up. This is the critical vocal range and the area where box designs and crossovers cause the most damage. Thus we have found an inexpensive way to create the same transparency and detail once available only with the CDT™ at much higher cost.

We hope that you now have a better understanding of where the Micro came from and why it will outperform similarly sized conventional technologies. The Micro is capable of delivering very detailed and holographic sound, in a word realism. The Nucleus Micro maintains our high end heritage and utilises all we have learned during our first seven years of research and development.