gallo ref3 with the golden ear awards?

Apparently, yes. See the Vandie sub, which is down firing. (Actually slot loaded.) They are still crossed over at 6 db per octave and you'd want them in the same acoustic plane as the speakers.

You can search out reviews for Vandersteen and Thiel at stereophile.com. They show the step response graphs to give an indication of time alignment. The answer, imo, is that there are speakers which are time and phase coherent over parts of their range under certain measurement conditions, but that no one has yet really proven how much of an advantage this provides. Every design approach has theoretical pluses and minuses. I happen to like Vandersteen speakers a great deal.

These speakers sound like crud, perhaps even worse. They sound as BAD as they look cool. I went in to the store to hear these just for fun, I have no agenda to bash Gallo speakers, but, wow, I could never listen to these. My ears were hurting after 5 minutes. A fine example of a company puchasing great reviews and hype ruling over reality.

I have extensively listened to these several times.
The Gallo's are good, decent speakers, but the Von Schweikerts are much better. I really cannot see,[hear], how these won golden ear awards! Oh well.

Bostonaudi and Audio_girl, I seriously question whether the Ref 3s you heard were broken in. I almost gave up on mine for sounding so grim until the first 100 hours was up. Also, I've head that more than one audio store is wiring them wrong, using the subwoofer (second voice coil) inputs instead of the main inputs by mistake. Right after I got mine, my salesman said he had sold 11 pairs in six weeks, and no pairs of any other speakers costing more than $2K, and this was BEFORE the first Absolute Sound review.

Bostonaurdi, since many reviewers, owners and future owners have express opinions radically different than yours, could it be that you were listening to either defective equipment or that the room dimensions were awful. One should never be to certain of an opinion based only on one audition. I have heard the Gallos in the same store 3 times and each time the sounded different, but at know time did they sound as you discribe. In my humble opinion the Gallo tweeter is incapable of producing harsh sounding high frequencies, unless the source material is pure garbage.