Loudspeaker company GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by audio industry veteran Sandy Gross1 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 20202 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 2019.3 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 Audio-Quest’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
