There exists a school of thought that says that a pair of two-way standmounts paired with two subwoofers will best the sound of a full-range floorstander. Why? Because separate speakers and subs give us complete control over each box’s contribution to low bass. We can’t relocate or (easily) attenuate a passive floorstander’s bass drivers, especially if we’ve sworn off DSP to maintain our turntable’s analogue ‘purity’. I am a subscriber to this school of thought…
…well, in theory.
With great power comes large dollops of responsibility. We must possess the necessary skills to seamlessly blend the subwoofers’ uppermost frequencies with the lower reaches of our standmount loudspeakers.
A subwoofer’s optimal position might not be immediately next to the loudspeaker. To find out, we ask: where are our room’s bass peaks and nulls? Hello, subwoofer crawl! But what if the results put one or both subwoofers in visually intrusive or impractical locations; or further from the amplifier’s subwoofer output socket than our cable/s will allow?
We’re not done yet.
Next, we ask: does our subwoofer’s internal signal processing introduce a small time delay to cause late-playing bass? If so, we’ll almost certainly need to sit the subwoofer in front of the loudspeaker plane.
Only once the optimal position has been found within the limits of our day-to-day practicalities can we think about each subwoofer’s crossover frequency and experiment with its gain and phase settings. A game of trial and error ensues to eat days, maybe weeks.
What a faff!
Not every listener wants to play amateur loudspeaker system designer to get a look at – or to feel – musical information below 50Hz.
So — what if we had a floorstander that puts a two-way standmount up top and powered sub-bass unit down low? We’d lose the ability to separate the bass unit from the loudspeaker but we’d pick up the manufacturer’s mid/bass-to-bass crossover design skills – likely better than our own – whilst retaining full control over each bassmaker’s gain level via a rear-panel rotary just in case we wish to adjust bass output according to boundary proximity or – shock horror – taste.
Enter the slimline GoldenEar T66 that marries a High-Velocity Folded Ribbon AMT tweeter – the same used in the Triton Reference – to a pair of 4.5″ midrange drivers arranged D’appolito style and crossed over in the passive domain. The bass foundation to that three-driver array is laid by a pair of race-track bass drivers augmented by a pair of side-firing passive radiators.
Now for the twist: those race-track bass drivers are internally powered by a 500-Watt Class D amplifier with their crossover to the midrange drivers executed in DSP for a fully-active bass module.
If you’re one step ahead of me, you’ll have already clocked that our outboard amplifier doesn’t drive the GoldenEars’ bass, only the midrange drivers and the AMT tweeter. That puts lower demands on the amplifier’s power output rating to keep options as wide as possible.
Side note: the grilles being non-removable makes it trickier to get decent photos of each driver. I had to get creative with shooting angles.
This is not a Sandy Gross-designed loudspeaker. He sold GoldenEar to The Quest Group in 2020 with the T66’s design team ensuring that this new model remains sensitive to the company’s previous look and feel whilst: 1) adopting a different approach to crossover voicing; 2) improving the internal wiring (as one might expect with The Quest Group also owning AudioQuest); 3) implementing a thicker, more rigid and inert cabinet; 4) designing a cast metal plinth; and 5) improving the subwoofer amplifier and DSP crossover.
The T66 sell in high gloss black for €7000/pair with the high-gloss Santa Barbara Red finish adding €300 to the bill. Before the review samples arrived, I was a little concerned about the red being too strong. Thankfully, it’s a deep red that only pops when subjected to direct sunlight.
And in case it’s not obvious, these GoldenEar loudspeakers demand power cables (for the bass module) in addition to the usual loudspeaker cables.
Our video review of the T66 will land in approximately 6 – 8 weeks.
Further information: GoldenEar