Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Loudspeaker manufacturer GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by a team led by Sandy Gross, who over the decades was responsible for a succession of affordable high-performance loudspeakers from Polk and Definitive Technology (footnote 1). Gross continued that tradition with GoldenEar: Even the company's flagship, the Triton Reference, which I favorably reviewed in January 2018, was priced a couple of dollars short of $8500/pair. (GoldenEar was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest, in January 2020; Gross continued with the brand as president emeritus.)

When Stereophile Editor Jim Austin asked if I would be interested in reviewing GoldenEar's new stand-mounted design, the BRX (for Bookshelf Reference X), which is competitively priced at $1599/pair, I was interested to find out if what I had liked about the brand's floorstanding models had trickled down.

The BRX
"Trickle down" is the appropriate term: The BRX does indeed feature technology from GoldenEar's Triton Reference. The 6" polypropylene-cone woofer is basically the same as the Triton Reference's upper-bass/midrange driver, with its cast basket, low-mass voice-coil, and what GoldenEar calls a Focused Field magnet structure, designed to better direct the magnetic flux into the voice-coil gap. However, the BRX's implementation of this drive-unit has a conventional dustcap rather than the ribbed pole-piece extension featured in the Reference. The BRX woofer is reflex-loaded with a pair of 6.5" flat passive radiators, one mounted on each sidewall so that their reactive forces cancel.

The BRX's tweeter is the HVFR (High-Velocity Folded Ribbon) unit used in the Triton Reference. This driver, which uses a neodymium magnet, is a development of the Air-Motion Transformer that was invented by the late Oskar Heil in the 1970s. An aluminum voice-coil is deposited on a plastic substrate, and the resulting diaphragm is folded into accordion-style pleats. When current is passed through the conductors, air is squeezed in and out of the pleats, generating sound. The Heil patent expired in 2004, and variations of this high-sensitivity drive-unit are now used by a number of speaker brands. The crossover is said by GoldenEar to use a "floating" configuration utilizing high-quality film capacitors, and electrical connection is via a recessed pair of binding posts on the speaker's rear panel.

Like all the GoldenEar models, the BRX, which is manufactured in China, features an immaculate high-gloss, piano-black lacquer finish. The cabinet is wider at the rear than it is at the front, and its base is fitted with rubber feet. A small lip at the bottom of the front baffle supports the magnetically attached, black metal-mesh grille.

Setup
I initially sat the GoldenEars on the 24" Celestion stands that I use for bookshelf speakers, these placed where the similar-sized KEF LS50s have worked best in my room. However, with the 24" stands, I found that I needed to slump in my seat to get the optimal mid-treble balance from the BRXes. I replaced the Celestion stands with the Sanus SF30 stands recommended by Sandy Gross. These 30" twin-pillar stands placed my ears just below the tweeter axis, which was 38" from the floor with the stands fitted with carpet-piercing spikes.

The upper bass was a little lighter-balanced with the GoldenEars on the taller stands than it had been on the shorter Celestion stands, so I experimented with positioning. The woofer of the left-hand BRX ended up 30" from the LPs that line the nearest sidewall; the right-hand speaker's woofer was 39" from the bookshelves that line its sidewall. Both woofers were 72" from the wall behind them. I couldn't place the speakers any closer to the wall due to a raised platform behind the right-hand BRX that leads to the vestibule.

The BRXes were toed in to point directly at the listening position. Although I had filled the pillars of my Celestion stands with a mix of sand and lead shot to damp resonances, the Sanus stand's pillars are empty and not easily filled. The Sanus stands decouple the top plate from the pillars with cork washers; I added my usual pads of Blu Tack between the BRX's base and the stand's top plate and damped the pillars by resting cloth bags filled with lead shot against their bases.

Listening
Once I had finalized the positions of the GoldenEar BRXes, I started my serious listening, driving the speakers first with the Parasound Halo JC 1+ monoblocks that I reviewed in the June 2020 issue, then with the NAD M10 integrated amplifier that I purchased after my review in January. Initially, I didn't use the grilles, but I found later that the mid-treble balance was usefully a tad less forward-sounding with the grilles in place.

The dual-mono pink noise track on my Editor's Choice CD (Stereophile STPH016-2) acquired a bit of low-treble emphasis if I sat so that I could see the tops of the cabinets, but it sounded evenly balanced, uncolored, and smooth when I sat with my ears just below the BRXes' tweeters. With the grilles on, the central image of the noise signal was extremely narrow, with no splashing to the sides at any frequency. When I removed the grilles, a little more "Vertical Venetian Blind" effect was audible when I moved from side to side (footnote 2), the opposite of what I was expecting.

The BRXes reproduced the 1/3-octave warble tones on Editor's Choice with good weight down to the 50Hz band. The 40Hz tone was just audible, as was the 32Hz tone, which got some help from the lowest-frequency mode in my room. The 25Hz and 20Hz warbles were inaudible. The half-step–spaced low-frequency tonebursts on Editor's Choice spoke cleanly down to 50Hz, with no emphasis of any of the tones. When I listened to the speakers' top panels with a stethoscope while these tones played, I could hear some low-level vibrational modes between 256Hz and 512Hz. Overall, the enclosure is well-damped, however.

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Footnote 1: Interviews with Gross can be found here and here.

Footnote 2: Also known as picket-fencing. See the entry in J. Gordon Holt's Glossary.