GOLDENEAR TRITON REFERENCE

GoldenEar’s Triton Reference has just won the top-tier loudspeaker award from our sister magazine Sound+Image — it is their ‘Loudspeaker of the Year over $10,000’. More specifically this flagship model sells at $17,995 the pair. So possibly some readers may be surprised that one of the key words Sound+Image used to describe the Triton Reference is “value”. With which we would concur — that’s exactly what GoldenEar has achieved here.

Indeed we gather that the Triton Reference was originally envisaged as having a six-figure price-tag. But it was apparently decided that this price would not be in keeping with GoldenEar’s motto, which is “We make high-end affordable”. Yet despite the reduction in resources necessitated by having to build to a selling price less than one twentieth that of the original figure, GoldenEar has still managed to pack more technology — and more drivers, and more amplifiers — into the Triton References than most other speakers selling for two to ten times the price. At its very first outing (CES 2017) it collected a first industry award for Design and Engineering. They have since garnered The Absolute Sound’s Editors’ Choice Award, plus awards from HomeTheaterReview.com, Home Theater High Fidelity, and selection as Audio Product of the Year by industry association HTSA (Home Technology Specialists of America).

HYBRID LOUDSPEAKERS

The sweep of awards is all the more remarkable given that the Triton Reference design is fairly unusual, by which we mean to say it is a type that is very popular with GoldenEar’s engineers, but not often found in the products from other speaker manufacturers. That’s because it’s partially active and partially passive… a so-called ‘hybrid’ design. Most loudspeaker manufacturers who build active speakers (where one or more amplifiers are built into the speakers) tend to make their speakers completely active, so there is no need to use an external amplifier at all… indeed that’s one of