John Darko
John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts — I was playing that album last week whilst flitting between two very different loudspeaker systems: the Piega 701 Wireless Gen 2 – a streaming speaker – and 2023’s POY, the KEF R3 Meta, which is a passive noisemaker.
Passive means the crossover comprises capacitors, inductors and resistors that sip on outboard loudspeaker drive to require no power source of their own. The Piega is a hybrid design whose drivers are arranged in a 3-way configuration with the crossover a combination of active and passive.
The handoff from bass to mids is handled by a (powered) DSP board but the blend between the mids and treble is executed by a passive analogue circuit (a la R3 Meta). On drivers, we are talking 4 x 12cm bass, a single 12cm midranger and Piega’s pièce de résistance, its LDR ribbon tweeter. If the L doesn’t already stand for large, I’ll wanna know why.
Piega also put the 701 Wireless Gen 2’s amplification inside each of the twin towers. Two Class D amps are used to power the bass drivers with a third tasked with driving the passive crossover that splits the audio signal between the midrange driver and the ribbon tweeter.
If you think KEF passive vs Piega semi-active is a strange side-by-side comparison to make, allow me to share one key early finding.
Being passive, the KEFs require an external amp, DAC and streamer to put them functionally on par with the Piega system. I initially used a Cambridge Audio EVO 150 for a total system cost of around €6000 once we drop 10% of our total system budget on cables. The Piega system goes for €7500; or €8089 once we add the indispensable Connect Plus hub. More on that in a moment.
Now comes our preview’s wrinkle: to get the R3 Meta’s performance to best the Piega’s, I had to cut streaming, D/A conversion and amplification duties over to a NAD M33 power amplifier and its matching M66 pre-amplifier whose spendier specs push the KEF’s total system cost a long way north of €10k. And that’s before we even consider a subwoofer (or two), which isn’t mandatory with the Piega but might be for many R3 Meta owners. The 701 Wireless Gen 2 are rated by the Swiss manufacturer down to 28Hz.
What about streaming?
We don’t call down ones and zeroes to the loudspeakers directly but to an intermediary hub called the Piega Connect Plus. This hub effectively ‘splits’ the incoming signal before sending left channel data to the left speaker and right channel data to the right speaker. Readers spying the similarities to Buchardt’s streaming actives are advised that the Swiss box uses the KleerNet protocol and not WISA — and is no worse for it. I’ve so far experienced not a single dropout from the Piega speakers and my preference goes to KleerNet’s three colour-coded transmission bands that, when matched on the rear of each loudspeaker and the Connect Plus, see all three find each other automagically. That’s neat!
Whilst we’re on the back of the speaker, each Piega offers up an RCA analogue input for purists feeding the 701 Wireless Gen 2 with an analogue pre-amplifier. But the way I see it, that would be like having a dog and barking yourself. How so? On the Connect Plus’s rear, we find connectivity for HDMI ARC (to which I connected a Samsung Frame and noted zero lip-sync lag), TOSLINK and coaxial (which in my house went to a Pro-Ject CD transport). The RCA sockets may never see a phono stage hook-up. Inside the Connect Plus, we note support for Spotify Connect, Google Chromecast, Apple AirPlay 2 and Roon Ready.
Like Buchardt’s ‘Platin’ hub, there’s no Tidal Connect on the Connect Plus hub there is a Bluetooth remote control wand whose plastic body feels cheaper and less sturdy than the Buchardt wand’s metal housing. Piega counter with a neat-n-functional smartphone app that does volume control, source selection and room compensation. However, whilst shooting the b-roll for this video, I found out the hard way that the Piega hub’s room compensation tech talks only to the iOS app. The Android version won’t ‘read the room’ and only lets us turn the room correction on and off.
To head off complaints at the pass about my having an acoustically treated listening room to somehow put software-based room ‘correction’ at a disadvantage, I moved the 701 Wireless Gen 2 from beside the KEF in my main listening room to a spare room with more real-world acoustics (read: too much reverb above 300Hz). That room is where we shot the majority of our video, which will land on YouTube in 2 – 3 weeks.
Further information: Piega
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2nFPZLNIWb/
