Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Loudspeaker company GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by audio industry veteran Sandy Gross after he left Definitive Technology. With a design team based in Canada that included Martyn Miller, who is still GoldenEar's senior acoustic engineer, GoldenEar produced a series of relatively affordable speakers that garnered favorable reviews in Stereophile. The most recent of these was the BRX (Bookshelf Reference X) standmount, which I reviewed in September 2020 and have been using as one of my reference loudspeakers since.

The BRX was the last GoldenEar speaker to be produced under Sandy Gross's aegis; in January 2020, the company was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest. At the 2023 High End Munich show, Quest announced a new GoldenEar speaker, the floorstanding T66, said to be the first model in a new series.

Enter the T66
The GoldenEar T66's form factor and upper-frequency drive unit array resemble those of the Triton One.R Kalman Rubinson reviewed in December 2019. Like the One.R, the T66 is a slimline, three-way tower with a powered subwoofer section. While the veneered enclosure is available in high-gloss black, priced at $6900/ pair, there is also an elegant-looking dark red finish, which GoldenEar calls Santa Barbara Red; the red finish increases the price to $7200/pair.

The drive units are mounted vertically inline on the front baffle behind the curved black mesh grille. The High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR) AMT tweeter is positioned between two 4.5" midrange/bass drivers with Multi-Vaned Phase Plugs and diecast baskets. One of two 5" × 9" "Quadratic" subwoofer drivers sits below the lower mid/bass unit; the other is placed at the base of the baffle. On each side of the enclosure is an 8" × 12" passive radiator, covered by a metal grille. The subwoofers are powered by a 500W power amplifier. The crossover from the upper-frequency drivers is implemented with DSP.

The T66's analog crossover features bypass capacitors that have been treated with AudioQuest's proprietary Permanent Molecular Optimization (PMO) process, and the speaker is internally wired with AudioQuest's direction-controlled, Perfect-Surface Copper+ (PSC+) cable, which also employs a carbon layer said to maximize RF noise dissipation. Electrical connection is via two pairs of high-quality binding posts on the rear panel; gold-plated PSC+ jumpers are provided for those who don't want to biwire. The subwoofer amplifier's input is taken from the midrange/woofer posts, but there is also an LFE RCA input jack. The T66 sits on a cast-aluminum base with four adjustable conical feet that can be fitted with carpet-piercing spikes or rubber tips.

Martyn Miller was responsible for the T66's fundamental design, but Garth Powell, AudioQuest's senior director of engineering, optimized the loudspeaker's performance. In a Zoom interview, Powell outlined his role for me:

"It was basically trying to figure out, with a limited budget, what was being overlooked? What can we do? We're not going to be wedded to any principle or any standards. We're going to do whatever it takes to get the result we want."

Changes Garth made were to replace the filler material in the midrange units' internal chamber with more absorbent cotton batting and long-hair wool, and, of course, to upgrade the internal wiring with AudioQuest cable. I asked what else he changed.

"The reference-level products all had a Zobel network in them, [but] this belongs in an amplifier; it does not belong in a crossover. There's almost always going to be a rising top-end characteristic with folded-ribbon tweeters or Air Motion Transformers, whatever you want to call them, and I suspect that they created a filter that'll just tip the response down a bit and get rid of the peak. My first thought was like, well if this is for ultrasonic isolation, this is not doing any good. It's extra parts. It's undoubtedly creating phase shift and creating sonic problems that we don't want. Let's see what it's doing. Let's see if I can build a better notch filter for the reference tweeter. And I'm telling you, as God is my witness, everything I tried failed. It never sounded right.

"The thing about folded ribbons is that as soon as you get a little bit off-axis, they fall off quickly. If you make this thing laboratory flat, you're going to hate it, because the second you're a little off-axis, the air frequencies are just gone. I decided we're going to go with our ears, and we're going to accept the fact that with measurements I have a rising top end, but it's not ringing, and it's not bothering me. So that was the first thing that I addressed."

I commented that, unlike the earlier GoldenEar speakers, the T66 has two pairs of binding posts, so that the tweeter and the two midrange/woofers can be driven separately.

"We're big believers in biwiring. The tweeter was more efficient than the two midrange drivers—not massively, but I had a couple of dB to work with. This allowed me to put an L pad at the input instead of having it all done at the other end of the network. You end up with a lot fewer errors on transients."

I asked about the other changes he had made to the crossover. He replied that as well as getting rid of the ferrous parts, at critical locations he added bypass capacitors similar to those he used in AudioQuest's Niagara AC power conditioners. He also revised various component values to compensate for manufacturing variations in the drive unit parameters.

"A crossover is a filter network, and I've been dealing with filters my whole life. It doesn't matter if it's an AC filter or a crossover, it's the same thing. Just the voltages are different. So it becomes a question of, where does it ring? How do you damp it? It was just a matter of tweaking a lot of very good work that had already been done in a great anechoic chamber. And I told Martyn, when he gets these things back, he'll think I did nothing, because I'm talking about less than a dB. But over all these different frequency points, it's going to add up to a lot."

Setting up
GoldenEar's Chris Volk delivered a pair of Santa Barbara Red T66s and, with the help of AudioQuest's Stephen Mejias, set the speakers up in my listening room. They biwired the review samples with AudioQuest Robin Hood Combo speaker cables, used AudioQuest Monsoon AC cords to power the integral subwoofers from my AudioQuest Niagara 5000 conditioner, and, as recommended both by Garth Powell and by the manual, left the T66s' grilles in place. The speakers ended up fairly close to where the Triton References I had reviewed in December 2018 had worked best, with the front baffles 88" from the wall behind the speakers and 113" from my ears.

My room is somewhat asymmetrical, so the drive units of the left speaker were 53" from the nearest sidewall, those of the right speaker 58" from its sidewall. Chris and Stephen began with the speakers toed in to my listening position, but once they were satisfied with the positions, they backed off on the toe-in so that the enclosure's inner sidewalls were just visible from the listening position. They then experimented with the levels of the subwoofers and decided to leave both speakers' controls set to the central, 12:00 position.