Could a speaker review make you emotional enough to cry? Give me a few minutes, and we’ll find out. The occasion for this article is a speaker review—specifically, the GoldenEar T66. If you’re not familiar with GoldenEar, you will be shortly, and you may be surprised to know that the speaker brand hails from a distinguished lineage of speaker brands with which I’m pretty sure you are familiar.
Before I get into the speakers themselves, though, I need/want to tell you a very personal story for two reasons. One: I just couldn’t do this review any other way, and I think you’ll understand why in just a moment. Two: This story explains a certain bias I had going into this review. You need to know where that bias comes from, and the degree to which I am able to set it aside for an objective evaluation. If you want to skip ahead, you can scroll ahead to the Review section. But I hope you stick with me here, because… well, this is super important to me.
I don’t often get super personal in reviews, but I need to do just that. I’d like you to meet my dad. Darryl Denison. Born on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Transplanted to California as a young teenager, my dad had a pretty tough life growing up. Both parents were in the military—at Pearl Harbor during the attack that marked the United States’ official entry into World War II, actually—and that meant a very strict, no-frills upbringing. My dad was always a hard worker, but he didn’t make a lot of money. After he served as an air traffic controller stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War, he met and married my mom, and supported his family through an eclectic series of odd jobs. He was a church pastor, a carpenter, a seismograph operator for a blasting company, and so much more. The family grew, and after my brother and sister were born, we moved in with my grandparents so he could go back to school and earn his nursing degree—it was time for a career.
Like I said, we didn’t have much money growing up. But we always had some kind of stereo system. At first, it was a little all-in-one turntable/receiver paired with cheap speakers. After he graduated from the nursing program and got his first decent-paying job, he bought an RCA rack system at JCPenney that looked far cooler than it sounded. He later handed the little turntable system down to me and my brother, and I got to have it in our room. Over the years, my dad came to learn that I loved electronics and music as much as he did. And it became something we could bond over. I always had a complicated relationship with my dad, but stereo gear and music were a mutual passion that always brought us close together.
I’ll never forget the day my dad decided to buy the family our very first high-end audio system. He was finally making some decent money—having worked his tail off for years—and had saved up for something nice. I was so excited to be by his side as we took a trip down to Fred’s Sound of Music in Portland, Oregon, to pick out components for a new system. Together, we listened to a bunch of gear. And together we decided on Carver separates and, ultimately, Paradigm speakers. I was so proud that my opinion mattered that day. I felt a level of trust and acknowledgment like I hadn’t before. It’s a feeling I’d continue to chase, even as an adult. I was obsessed with how this system sounded. My father beamed with pride as I dug into speaker positioning, learned about stereo imaging and holography, and played around with the various buttons on the Carver gear in search for the best sound.
Fast-forward to about 2012. After getting laid off from a speaker company during the recession in 2008, I was brought on as a speaker reviewer for Digital Trends. I think my first review was for a subwoofer. And then I got a set of Orb Audio’s speakers. I worked my way up as a speaker reviewer, but nobody knew who I was, and I wasn’t recognized as an expert in tech by anyone—including my dad. I think my dad was proud that I had managed to turn lemons into lemonade and leverage my years of passion and experience in audio into a job that helped support my little family. But despite the tens of thousands of page views I got on my reviews, I could tell my dad didn’t hold me in the same regard as the reviewers he respected from the magazines he loved to read. Like a lot of aspirational armchair audiophiles, my dad was really into Stereophile magazine. He also had Sound and Vision and Absolute Sound mags piled up around his home. He had a certain kind of reverence for writers like John Atkinson, Michael Fremer, and Steve Guttenberg. They were the big fish, and I was a small fry. Objectively, he was right. I wasn’t at that level. But I wanted to be at that same level in his eyes. And not just because I was his son.
One day I got an unexpected email from Sandy Gross, founder of Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, and GoldenEar Technology. I don’t know why he chose me to review his latest speaker, but I was grateful for the opportunity. When I got the speakers, I was floored. And I knew that I had to do my best work. Better than I had ever done before. So, I took my time. I lost sleep over the review. I even felt sick the day my review of the GoldenEar Triton Seven speakers went live on January 30, 2014. I don’t know how much traffic that review got. But I do remember that GoldenEar was stoked about that review. In fact, GoldenEar liked it so much that it used a quote from my review in a full-page ad in Rolling Stone magazine. Can you imagine what it was like for me—a nobody speaker reviewer—to see their name printed in Rolling Stone magazine? I was over the moon. And I couldn’t wait to show my dad. He was proud of me, for sure. I mean, it was Rolling Stone! But he didn’t seem to see it the same way I did. I felt to me like I had finally made it. But I didn’t sense that validation from my dad. I was a little hurt. Deflated. I know my dad loved me and was proud of me. What would it take for him to put me on the same pedestal he’d put these other writers? I may be wrong about this, but I got the feeling he’d have been more excited if he’d seen my name alongside those other writers—in their magazines.
Time went on. I reviewed another set of GoldenEar speakers: The Triton Five. And, once again, GoldenEar used a quote from my review in its advertisements for those speakers. Only this time, the quote wasn’t in Rolling Stone, and I wasn’t the one who found it. My Dad found the ad and the quote in his precious Stereophile magazine. And he showed me. If you’re not an audio nerd, that might not carry much weight. Maybe you don’t understand why the mere memory of that moment sparks so much emotion for me. I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say that was a big, big deal. I finally felt like my dad respected me. I’m sure he always did, that’s just how I felt at the time.
Anyway. I went on to advance as a reviewer. I moved into televisions as my primary focus, but I’ve always treated myself—and, I hope, others—to a speaker review when I think I’ve found something special. And that included, among many others, the GoldenEar Triton One and Triton Reference speakers. I couldn’t afford to buy my dad anything quite as fancy as the Triton One, let alone the Triton Reference. But I did manage to buy my dad a pair of Triton Fives—the same speaker that landed my name in Stereophile magazine—even if it wasn’t because I was writing for Stereophile mag. And, folks, I can’t tell you how tickled my dad was to get these speakers from his son. The boy he worked so hard to raise and support. The boy who sent him off to work countless graveyard shifts at one job only to have to turn around and work day shifts at another. The boy he insisted on learning how to speak and write proper English. The boy with whom he shared this misunderstood passion for sound and audio gear.
My dad got to enjoy those speakers in his tiny home for a solid six months and then… Quite suddenly he was in the hospital fighting for his life. Esophageal cancer. He was gone in two weeks. My final memories of my dad from before he got sick were sitting in his tiny little living room and listening to music from our past on his GoldenEar speakers. I had converted an old Genesis Live concert cassette into a CD, and we sat there, remembering the past 35 years and how we arrived at that very moment. And we cried. That’s the last time I saw my dad outside of his deathbed. Together, in that little room, with his GoldenEar Triton Five speakers. I still have those speakers, and will until the day I die. But, yeah, you can imagine that living with, evaluating, and reviewing the new GoldenEar T66 has been an emotional journey for me. And hopefully, you can understand that there’s just no way I could talk about these speakers without acknowledging what the brand has meant to me personally.
With that said, I still think I can provide a pretty objective review of these speakers. And it is with a great amount of joy and relief that I am able to tell you that they are outstanding.
That leads me to how I really need to start this review. The T66 are the first speakers produced by GoldenEar Technology since Sandy Gross stepped down as president emeritus. And I don’t think there’s anyone familiar with Sandy Gross and the GoldenEar story who couldn’t have just a little bit of concern about whether the company could or would successfully carry on Sandy’s legacy. Like it or not, I think we all tend to form some level of emotional attachment to the brands we like—and fear any change that might disrupt that. (I feel the same way about Klipsch right now, but that’s a story for a different day.) But time marches on. And here we are with the T66 which, as it turns out, is an outstanding speaker.
There are some notable shifts away from elements that historically made GoldenEar speakers iconic. For example: The T66 sports an integrated, non-removable metallic grill rather than the cloth-covered plastic grills or full-on “sock-style” wraps we’ve seen on speakers past. There are also bi-wireable speaker terminals on the back, And, internally, GoldenEar would like you to know about the use of AudioQuest wiring and AudioQuest-approved crossover components (The Quest group now owns GoldenEar Technology). GoldenEar points to a few other developments unique to the T66—the gloss of Santa Barbara Red finish we have here, to the stock gloss-back finish, a new cast-iron base, and “dramatically augmented crossover design.” Save for the differences, much of the speaker’s design and engineering remains unmistakably GoldenEar, including the use of a DSP-controlled subwoofer amplifier, cast-basket mid-bass drivers with phase plugs, the stalwart AMT (Air Motion Transformer) folded ribbon tweeter, and planar bass radiators, which are activated by two 5-inch by 9-inch quadratic subwoofer drivers. The result is a tall, slender speaker that comes in at about 48.8 inches high, 14.75 inches deep, and just 7.5 inches wide.
But let’s get back to the driver complement and the subwoofer amplifier. What we have here is an MTM (mid-tweeter-mid) arrangement up top—a 4.5-inch mid-bass driver, the AMT ribbon tweeter with a finessed wool material on the baffle to absorb diffractions, then another 4.5-inch mid-bass driver. Just below that, we have one of the five 5-by-9-inch active woofers, and the other active woofer is all the way down here at the bottom. GoldenEar says spacing them out this way aids in driving these two passive bass radiators on either side of the speaker. The active subwoofer drivers up front are driven by a 1,000-watt DSP-controlled amplifier. When they move in and out, the passive bass radiators move sympathetically. So, essentially you’ve got four separate surfaces making bass in each speaker. More on that benefit in a moment.
I used AudioQuest NRG-Z3 power cables that were sent along by AudioQuest as a bonus, though I am quite sure the stout power cables that come with the speakers are perfectly sufficient. Not gonna lie, though—I like how these look, matching with the wrap on the AudioQuest Rocket 33 speaker cables that were also sent for this review. The T66 have a sensitivity rating of 91db per watt as measured from 1 meter. This makes them slightly more sensitive than most “high-end” speakers, but not quite as easy to drive as, say, a horn-loaded Klipsch speaker. That is to say, you don’t need a massive amp to drive these speakers. In fact, I drove them to very satisfying sound pressure levels with my little 35-watt-per-channel Dynaco ST70 tube amp. But I will say the speakers offered far better dynamics when I used our Anthem STR integrated amp. And since I’m talking about gear, here’s what else I used to evaluate the T66. On the source side, I have the EAT B-sharp turntable with Ortofon Blue Cartridge, a Cambridge Audio Alva Duo phono pre-amp, a Magnetar UDP-900 disc player—I used the dedicated balanced stereo outputs only—and then there was the Dynaco PAS-3 tube pre-amp, ST 70 tube amp. And I even tossed the Naim Unity Nova in the mix just for fun toward the end. I used a mix of pristine vinyl records, redbook CDs, SuperAudio CDs, 4K Blu-rays, and high-res lossless streaming from Apple Music for my content sources.
How to describe the sound? At no point did I ever bring in an external subwoofer. Not only did I never feel the need for more bass but I was so supremely satisfied with the T66’s low-end performance that I just didn’t want to mess with it. Now, I suppose that in a movie system one could benefit from adding a dedicated subwoofer. But if you’re going to bother adding a sub to the T66, it better be a massive, air-moving titan of a subwoofer, because the only thing to gained by adding a sub is a glut of wall-shaking, booty massaging sub-bass that only a 15-inch or larger tank can deliver. For music? Leave your standalone sub off—you will neither need nor want it. For movies? Most of you out there won’t need a separate sub. The T66 can make bass you can feel if the content calls for it. But while the T66 can dress down in dickies and operate a jackhammer like a pro, it is just as comfortable donning a tailored Armani suit and handling the contra-bass and tympani duties at the symphony—and it covers everything in between. Gritty rock bass, punchy slap and funk bass, woody upright acoustic jazz bass. And it gives the same genre-agnostic treatment to drums, too. Deep, blooming kick drums on rock albums, tight, punchy kicks on jazz records, and massive orchestral percussion were all reproduced with agility, authority, and truthful tonality. And it has power in reserve, too. True story: My robot vacuum managed to tug free the power cable to the right speaker without my knowledge, and I listened to the T66—just one subwoofer array in operation—for a good two days without feeling like I was missing any bass. It wasn’t until I plugged the right speaker in that I realized the true impact of having perfectly balanced bass in every square inch of this studio. Honestly, I don’t like using the term subwoofer when talking about this speaker because I worry that will have a certain connotation to the nature of the T66’s bass performance, which does not apply. The T66 doesn’t do “subwoofery” bass until it is supposed to do that. It is just lusciously, seamlessly integrated, musical, tuneful bass, and I’m here for it.
But I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit ahead of myself. I had a really, really hard time getting away from my vinyl collection while evaluating the T66. Every record I put on was rendered with such realism. There was so much life to the music, especially with vocals. I’ve always had great respect for Nancy Wilson as a vocalist, but the T66 speakers made me fall in love with her voice all over again. The presence I experienced made me feel like all of the actual Nancy Wilson was in my room—not just a picture of her face, ya know? The T66 made listening to her records feel like listening to the master tracks at the studio as opposed to the radio edit in a car. The same thing happened when I listened to my John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman record—it was breathtaking. Even Donald Fagen—a genus with (let’s be honest) a vocal quality that’s an acquired taste—sounded sweet coming out of the T66. If you’re someone who really tunes in to the vocals in music? You’ll love how the T66 put them in the room with you. They add nothing, and they take nothing away. And that goes not just toward authentically representing voices and instruments but to the soundstage of the recording itself. It is effortlessly wide and deep, but also tall. At one point I was hearing sounds coming from well above the elevated TV in my setup. It’s all from sonic holography and psychoacoustics, but it sounded like I could hear an 8-foot-tall Michael Breaker in the front of my room when I played Joni Mitchel’s The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines off her Shadows and Light album.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the T66 is that it pulled off all these awesome, lifelike musical qualities at just about any volume level. Sure, I listened at reasonable volumes and unreasonably loud volumes, and the T66 never gave up on dynamics; never got harsh or strained; never got shouty with compressed midrange. But, magically, the T66 sound amazing at super-low volume levels, too. If you’ve ever felt like you may as well not bother turning on your hi-fi system late at night because you can’t listen at the volume levels that bring out the best in your system for fear of waking someone up or disturbing them? If you’re in an apartment and just can’t turn your speakers up much? Try the T66—they will delight you at ANY volume level, including super-low levels.
Honestly, I could go on raving—and, maybe I will—but I do need to acknowledge that the T66 is not going to be everything for everyone. I love the T66 and will happily keep them forever if GoldenEar will let me. But I also recognize that there are sonic characteristics that they simply do not possess. For example: If you’re really into larger Klipsch speakers—say you’re a fan of Cornwalls, Heresy, or Forte series Klipsch speakers, which have this big, bold, organic thunk, thump, and slap to them? The kind of rock ‘n’ roll authenticity that transforms your listening space into a rock arena, complete with the 110-db, ear-splitting experience that comes with that environment? The T66 don’t really do that thing. No doubt, the T66 rock. But they tend to rock with a bit more decorum. They are less Harley-Davidson gas hog and more Ducati Diavel. Still a fire-breather that will get you there, but in a different style.
I want to go on. I want to say that as a trumpet player, how a speaker reproduces brass overtones is a critical performance metric for me, and the T66 deliver. How easy the speakers are to set up is another crucial factor of consideration, and I found that the T66 are about as effortless as they come in that regard. But I know I’m getting a bit long-winded. So let’s wrap this up.
Are they expensive? Yes. $7,000 a pair is a lot for most folks. Though I would argue—as GoldenEar speakers always have—that the T66 laugh at speakers costing three times as much. I think that’s what thrilled my dad about the GoldenEar speakers I gave him. He finally got the kind of sound he had always dreamed of hearing in his own home, but thought he would never get to experience because he was sure that kind of sound came with a price tag that, despite his hard work and career advancement over six decades, may always have been out of reach.
Over the last few months, I’ve spent hours listening to records that define my childhood relationship with my dad. He’s been gone for over seven years, yet I feel closer to him than ever before.
I think a lot of folks tend to look at loudspeakers as toys—bro wants a rad stereo—or as tools. You like to hear music, and you need something to make it in your home. But, if the experience and memories I made with my dad have taught me anything, it’s that a pair of speakers can be as personal and treasured as a fancy watch that gets handed down from generation to generation. A family heirloom. An object that can carry the spirit of the loved ones who enjoyed it before us, evoking memories of a time long past. Maybe the T66 aren’t the exact same speakers that my dad and I gathered around just weeks before he left me, but they carry on the same tradition—one I will share and pass along to my own daughter. When I’m gone, I want my little girl to remember the times we spent on the couch, listening to music together, escaping the noise of the world around us in favor of the sonic consonance and dissonance that literally shapes our souls. And when she does, I imagine the GoldenEar T66 will be there, too.
