When a speaker has a pompous-sounding name like GoldenEar Triton Two, you either get sound that is equally epic or you start thinking of funny comments. These tall three-way floor standers, packed with enough hi-end technology to make NASA jealous , had our expectations at an all time high.
When Sandy Gross and Don Givogue,the duo behind Polk Audio and Definitive Technology,get together, you can be sure the result will be nothing less than a master blend of hi-end technology at a relatively affordable price. Then ame they came up with for their company is ‘GoldenEar’, which seems appropriate for the Triton Two Tower speakers we heard in our studio—an experience we aren’t going to forget in a hurry.
OUT OF THE BOX
The GoldenEar Triton Twos share an uncanny resemblance to DefTech’s Mythos STS, all thanks to the makers. This, by no means, is a bad thing because both ofthese pairs look exquisite, though, if I may say so, the Triton Twos are more so. The primary reason for this resemblance is the high-ribbed planar drivers that cover the bottom half of the front baffl e. The towers stand tall and come covered in a black cloth grille tightened under the slanted top plate. The pair is thinner than most towers this high and you might wonder what’ll happen to all that bass GoldenEar seems to be promising on their website. Under the grilles is a wide array of drivers that look as unconventional as the cloth covering them. The bottom of the side panel has been dedicated to the sub-driver that shares the same not totally circular driver dimension. The only hint of a non-black colour on the entire front baffle comes from the light brown ribbon tweeter that sits between a pair of mid-units. The back panel looks far busier than most other tower back panels with a power socket and a knob along with the speaker terminals.
TECHNOLOGY
The three-way GoldenEar Triton Two floorstander comes with enough highlights to make this section of our review longer than the other sections of the review combined. The towers stand 48” tall and its cloth grille has a curve because of the metal frame that holds the cloth up and out of the driver’s way. The front is narrower than the back, which while making the speaker look thinner than most of the competition, keeps the front baffl e narrow enough to effect imaging in a positive way.
The tweeter is a HVFR (High-Velocity Folded Ribbon) tweeter that GoldenEar claims ‘propagates sound waves and moves air by squeezing it with its accordion-like pleated diaphragm, rather than pushing it like conventional drivers do.’ This tweeter sits in an MTM (Mid-Tweeter-Mid) layout, surrounded on both sides with a MVPP or Multi-Vaned Phase Plug-equipped 4.5” mid-range drivers. These speakers, although regarded as mid-range drivers, can extend to above 20kHz. The reason why GoldenEar has ensured this so that these speakers can blend and keep up with the ribbon tweeter they’ve been coupled with. The bottom half has been dedicated entirely to the lower and mid-lower frequencies with a 1200W ForceField subwoofer that uses two 5”x9” woofers coupled with two 7”x10” passive radiators. The reason why these towers have that oblong shape (also why they were used in Def Tech’s ‘same model’) is to help prevent certain types of diaphragm resonances and breakup standing waves that can occur with conventional woofers. The level of the subwoofer can be adjusted by the knob on the back panel and it gets these towers to go as low as 16Hz. Suddenly, the 5.5” wide baffle doesn’t seem like it’ll have any problems cranking out the specified lower frequencies.
PERFORMANCE
Speakers this big always require atleast a two-man effort to get them into our studio. Once we got the GoldenEar Triton Two Tower settled in, we were told to give them about 100 hour of break-in time as this was a brand new pair we were dealing with. Two days of anxious waiting later, we rushed to our studio and gave this pair a good spin. We dropped in Kings Of Convinience’s ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’ and let the first track, "Winning A Battle, Losing The War" spin out. What we heard was an overwhelmingly wide image of the two guitars, each panned a little to the left and the right. The clarity of the strings was exquisite and we could hear the depth of the guitar’s box that the strings were being plucked off. We only had the ribbon tweeters to thank for the tingling sparkle in the guitar plucks, and once the harmonising voices of the two vocalists came through, the tweeters let their sibilance spread over the rest of their words. With the lights turned off, the music blended into the walls and had us believing that the entire width of the front wall was covered with speakers. The Tritons just disappeared without a trace and what they left behind was a soundstage that brought us tears of joy. With Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’, we heard the subwoofer kick in with every single kick-drum and bass guitar hit. The bottom half of the towers really are perfect matches in control and detail to their top halves because you can effortlessly hear every single time the bass guitar string hits the guitar’s body because of being hit too hard. There is no hang in the bass no matter how deep it might go, although every time a really deep note came in and sustained itself, the Triton Two Tower speakers leaped at the opportunity to let the passive radiators spread it to the four corners of our room. If it was a quicker note, the cabinet would help a great deal in stopping the frequencies at just the right moment, so as not to trail off beyond the note length intended. The more ambient the music we dropped into the speakers, the wider they got. With the sheer number of drivers dedicated to rendering particular frequency ranges, the Triton Two Tower can instantaneously drown you in a massive wave of reverberating pads from Loscil’s ‘Plume’ LP. When the music got heavier, like Tool’s ‘Lateralus’, the distortion of the guitars were kept more to the front, taking the form of a thick wall. And even in all this distortion, you could hear Maynard’s vocals as clear as crystal, with all the details of his voice intact. At the same time, the widely panned drum-kit that Tool loves to use, gave all the drivers percussive work, which the Triton Two Tower unleashed in not just their horizontal but vertical imaging space as well.
CONCLUSION
The GoldenEarTriton Two Tower are massive speakers and the bigger the room you give them, the more you can spread them apart, and the wider will become your sweetspot.They can make any piece of music sound interesting, even the old Billie Holiday turntable-to-CD transfers you may have lying around, because they add such immense depth to the music that your ears take no time in getting absorbed into the soundstage. Truly, a flawless example of hi-end audio and at a price that gives even the average man a chance to acquire one of them.