Marantz CD-60 Single Play CD Player, $1000
Just in is Marantz’s new CD-60. It is the best $1K ish player on the market. Its sound is warm as opposed to cool.
While we’re impressed when a big buck product pushes the state of the art, we’re even more impressed when an affordable product sets new standards for its price point.
GoldenEar Towers
There are a lot of “good” speakers on the market. In general your money buys you an array of cones and domes purchased from some vendor and screwed into a box. They come in all shapes and sizes under a myriad of brand names. But the fact is, most are actually quite similar to everything else on the market.
Why not look for something better? Let’s ask for a more advanced approach and go a cut above.
GoldenEar started its company in 2010 with a handful of smart ideas:
- Ribbon Tweeters
- Powered Subwoofers
- D’Appolito Arrays
- Non Parallel Cabinet designs
- Narrow facias
- ABRs instead of ports
Even today, many moons later, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone else who has paid attention to all of these details- much less at GE’s competitive pricing structure.
GoldenEar makes among the best speaker values out there! They are lean and stylish so they’re easy to place in any living room. Most models have powered subwoofers, which makes them especially flexible to troublesome corner placement. All have ribbon tweeters for exceptionally smooth sound with an unbeatable image. They come in one flavor, piano gloss black, so they manufacture efficiently and you get economies of scale working for you.
Imaging
You can put them farther away from each other than you are from them, and still the center image is rock solid. When you consider the typical demands of putting speakers in a living room your wife will be happy with, GoldenEar offers the best solution to please you both. The ribbon tweeters and powered subs solve a lot of audiophile problems. Most of our customers start their discussion with, “I have a challenging room.” It’s very likely that one of GoldenEar’s models is the best choice for this shopper.
Powered Subs
Keep in mind, the powered models below (from T3+ on up) have high acceleration amps on board to drive the woofers. That means YOUR AMP only drives the tweet and mid drivers. Hence, these towers are over 90dB efficient and can be driven happily by a much wider array of amplifiers than similarly priced passive towers.
Bi-amping makes sense. The woofs have their own dedicated amp. The mids and tweets are controlled by YOUR amp. With this in mind, GoldenEar created the Tritons with powered subs.
There are two fully passive towers in the line. Triton 7 & 5 are just as smooth and beautiful as their bigger brothers. They simply have less bass.
Passive Towers
Triton 7 $1800 per pair (39.75h, 7.25w, 11d)
Ribbon tweet, two 5.25 cast mids in D’Appolito array, two 8” Quadratic radiators. What I love about T-7 is that it’s the FIRST TOWER OUT THERE to get you into a more sophisticated speaker- than the pile of domes and cones that is everybody else out there for $1800. T-7 elevates you from the bourgeois, to a sophisticated music transducer. Its bass is fairly deep- yet not at all FAT.
Triton 5 $2400 per pair (44.25h, 8 1/8w, 12 3/8d)
Ribbon tweet, two 6” cast mids in D’Appolito array, four 8” Quadratic radiators. T-5 provides a larger and more precise musical presentation from T-7. T-5 produces a significantly richer bottom end than T-7. More importantly, T-5 sounds larger and more clear than T-7.
Towers With Powered Subwoofers
Triton 3+ $3000 per pair (44h, 7w, 13d, 800w)
Ribbon tweet, one 4.5” cast mid, one 5×9” powered (800w) subwoofer, two Quadratic
radiators. T3+ is a great choice as a lean tower in stereo, or surround sound. Due to its powered sub and your ability to adjust it, T3+ is an especially smart choice for a condo or apartment, where you can be considerate of your neighbors, OR NOT!
Triton 2+ $4500 per pair (48h, 7.5w, 15d, 1200w)
Ribbon tweet, two 4.5” cast mids in D’Appolito array, two 5×9” powered (1200w) subs, two Quadratic radiators. T2+ is a significantly more powerful and dynamic brother to T3+. T2+ takes you from ample bass, to a much weightier impact. T2+ can start throwing the barbells around your room. T2+ is well worth the step up from T3+. T2+ is the refinement of GoldenEar’s classic T2, which put GE on the map in 2010.
Triton 1.R $7500 per pair (54h, 82, 16 5/8d, 1600w)
T 1.R is simply an amazing speaker! It is the first model in GoldenEar’s REFERENCE LEVEL speaker series.
It uses two 5.25 mid/woofs in D’Appolito config with the Ref Level Ribbon Tweeter. Yep, the Ref Level portion of GE’s line uses superior drivers to the lower portion of the line.
T 1.R uses three 5×9 heavy duty subwoofer drivers, driven by their own 1600w, DSP amp. The crossover is a new balanced design. The new monocoque cabinet with luxurious finish in piano gloss black is quite elegant. 1.R further controls bass with four 7×10 ABRs.
T 1.R is a class shattering speaker! It brings performance to its price range that exceeds just a pile of passive drivers screwed into a box.
Remember, your amp only sees the mids/tweet, so you don’t need an expensive amp to make the 1.R’s sing. You can run NAD’s C328 integrated for only $700 and drive these boys beautifully!
Triton Reference $11,000 per pair (58h, 9.25w, 18.75d, 1800w)
GoldenEar’s T-Ref is indeed a reference level speaker. The size of soundstage T-Ref can deliver is massive. Its powerful bass response also makes it stand out from its passive competition.
T-Ref uses, a new, higher performance REF LEVEL ribbon tweet, two 6” cast mids, three 6×10” powered (1800w!) subs, four Quadratic radiators and solid steel plinth.
The vaunted T-Ref competes with any speaker, at any price. It is big and bold. With a silky ribbon top end and thunderous bass response, T-Ref is the least expensive full range (meaning it DOES have extended low frequency response) speaker to ever earn Stereophile’s top echelon rating. Everything else in the list is twice to twenty times more expensive!
Alexander Blettenberg Wins Big
Alex is a fabulous young (28) pianist/conductor/composer of German/Greek heritage. He just won the Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna. He won $10,000. But more importantly he won a Bosendorfer Model 200 grand piano, worth over $100k. Today he’s a bit richer AND he’s got a state of the art piano!
