Rap your knuckles on a Gallo Strada 2 and, as Chris Martens of The Absolute Sound warns, you get bruised knuckles. Gallo builds its speakers around steel spheres instead of wooden boxes. A box has flat walls that trap sound inside and sharp front edges that scatter it on the way out, and Gallo says a sphere avoids both. The small models play everything above the bass through a single small driver, with no crossover, the circuit that usually splits the music between drivers. The bigger models add Gallo's own tweeter, a curved sheet of plastic film that flexes with the music and spreads the treble wide across the room. Steve Guttenberg compared the Micro SE's imaging to the "wide-open, boxless sound" of big flat-panel speakers. Gallo suits listeners who want a big stereo image from speakers small enough to vanish.

Start with the A'Diva SE, a little sphere John Potis of 6moons likened to a grapefruit. Guttenberg heard it as fuller and more open than the even smaller Micro SE. Beyond the desktop, plan on adding a subwoofer. Where the sub goes matters. When Guttenberg set up an A'Diva Ti system, Anthony Gallo told him to move the TR-2 sub from the corner to the middle, between the front speakers, and the blend came together. The step up is the Reference line, which John Richardson of pt.AUDIO thinks "probably hits the sweet spot value-wise." Its Strada 2 is essentially the midrange and tweeter of the Reference 3.5 tower, with two small drivers in steel spheres around the film tweeter. Martens got more bass with it a foot from the walls and better imaging on stands well out in the room. With a sub in the system, Anthony Gallo told Srajan Ebaen of 6moons to wire the Strada 2 straight to the amplifier, bypassing the sub's filter.

Anthony Gallo, born in 1963, began his speaker experiments at 14 with electrostatics, and he recalls that he "got shocked a zillion times." In the early 1980s he read a magazine article about piezo film, set it aside for a few years, and built the first version of his CDT tweeter in 1987. He refined it for most of the next decade before starting Anthony Gallo Acoustics in New York City. Doug Schneider of SoundStage wrote that the Nucleus series of spheres turned audiophile heads, and Richardson remembers the ads for Gallo's "eyeball" speakers. The Nucleus Micro took five years to develop and shipped in mid-1999. At CES in 2006, Wes Phillips and Jon Iverson of Stereophile heard the Reference 3.1 demo sound "bigger, realer, richer, and more dynamic" than most of the far costlier systems there. The floorstanding Reference 3.5 won wide acclaim, and Chris Groppi of Secrets bought a pair as his reference speakers. Gallo will finish its spheres in any color, and its speakers are installed in places such as the lobby of BBC Television Centre.