I jumped at the chance to review T+A’s $47,900/pair Solitaire S 530 loudspeakers for a few reasons.1 First, because T+A is a well-established company with an approach I like and respect: They make hi-fi equipment of the highest quality but with prices that, though substantial, are in line with their technology and execution. Their stuff is very handsome with impressive industrial design, but T+A doesn’t do audio jewelry. What’s more, though T+A is aggressive in R&D—their “Company” webpage says, “Actually, we’re scientists …”—but they are selective in the use of new technology. The third reason I was interested in reviewing a product from T+A is that their prices and technical level place them in a market segment I know well.
What I didn’t know until recently is that T+A makes loudspeakers, and they’re quite different from the loudspeakers other companies make. I only learned this when I started hearing about the S 530 and its larger sibling, the S 540, from friends—friends whose ears I trust.
For the last 15 years, I’ve been listening to relatively conventional, multi-point-source speakers, which emit overlapping, approximately spherical wavefronts from drivers that usually are round. This group includes most recently the excellent Wilson Sasha DAW, which I still own. Before that string of speakers, I’d been a huge proponent of line sources and planar dipoles: Genesis IIs and Magnepans, for example. Most of those loudspeakers had shortcomings—limitations in ultimate dynamics, impact, detail, sometimes bass extension—but I always found something inherently right about the sound, especially the way they recreated space, which more than made up for those shortcomings.
Which leads to the fourth and final reason I wanted to hear these speakers. When my very first audiophile friend—the one I’ve known the longest—told me about them, he said, “I think you’d really like them. They’re a line source.” That sealed the deal.
The T+A Solitaire S 530
The design of the Solitaire S 530 is unusual: When was the last time you saw a speaker that uses seven midrange drivers? Or, even weirder, a tweeter that’s almost 3' long?
Actually, the S 530 is relatively conventional compared to other line-array loudspeakers; consider The 50+ tiny drivers. The S 530 is a 4'-tall tower in a conventional-looking cabinet that’s deeper than it is wide but impressively stout and, based on a knuckle rap, substantially inert. You start to notice how unusual it is when you look at the front baffle, consisting entirely of a single thick slab of aluminum with drivers recessed into fluidly shaped, tapered recesses. The “Organic” baffle, as T+A calls it, is a waveguide that shapes the dispersion patterns of the individual drivers into “an ideal line source.” The quote is from the company website. Apparently a loudspeaker doesn’t need to be 10' tall to be a proper line source.
