Piega Premium Wireless 701
For the first time in the two years I’ve been living in this apartment building, I’ve received a noise complaint from a neighbor. Coincidence? As it happened, yes it was a coincidence. True, my music was pretty loud, and the bass from the Piega Premium Wireless 701 loudspeaker system ($7495/pair) was anything but reticent, especially considering the tower’s sleek appearance. But I was not the source of the specific noise that caused the complaint. That was the sloppy bass from another neighbor’s inferior sound system. (The bass from this Piega system isn’t sloppy.)
And yet, when I heard the complaint, I thought it was me. I assumed I’d been enjoying the Piega system a little too much, or a little too loudly.
Premium wireless
The active Piega 701s originate from a passive version of the same speaker. The wireless version adds DSP and 200W of class-D amplification, which Dominik Züger, Piega’s research and development lead, told me was outsourced to an electronics-specialist partner. Züger joined me for a Skype conversation from his home in Switzerland, where he was sheltering in place to avoid COVID-19.
The 701 speakers are sleek, two-and-a-half-way towers, neither dinky nor outsized. They’re big enough to make big sound—surprisingly big—but small enough to be suitable for a small apartment; in fact they’d look great in a modern apartment with a view looking out over the city.
The quality of the cabinets is high: The enclosures are extruded from a single piece of solid aircraft-grade aluminum in a process Züger amusingly described as “almost like making pasta but with just a little more force.”
Beyond a modern-luxe aesthetic, extruded aluminum has other benefits. Extrusion can yield a seamless, curved cabinet, with no right angles have wood in them: a wooden matrix for extra bracing.) For a given external size, aluminum allows more inside volume—or, conversely, the same internal volume can be achieved with a size. “We get more volume into the speaker and it still doesn’t look big,” Züger said.
