Marantz CD-60 Single Play CD Player, $1000

Just in is Marantz’s new CD-60. It is the best $1K ish player on the market. Its sound is warm as opposed to cool.

While we’re impressed when a big buck product pushes the state of the art, we’re even more impressed when an affordable product sets new standards for its price point.

GoldenEar Towers

There are a lot of “good” speakers on the market. In general your money buys you an array of cones and domes purchased from some vendor and screwed into a box. They come in all shapes and sizes under a myriad of brand names. But the fact is, most are actually quite similar to everything else on the market.

Why not look for something better? Let’s ask for a more advanced approach and go a cut above.

GoldenEar started its company in 2010 with a handful of smart ideas:

• Ribbon Tweeters

• Powered Subwoofers

• D’Appolito Arrays

• Non Parallel Cabinet designs

• Narrow facias

• ABRs instead of ports

Even today, many moons later, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone else who has paid attention to all of these details- much less at GE’s competitive pricing structure.

GoldenEar makes among the best speaker values out there! They are lean and stylish so they’re easy to place in any living room. Most models have powered subwoofers, which makes them especially flexible to troublesome corner placement. All have ribbon tweeters for exceptionally smooth sound with an unbeatable image. They come in one flavor, piano gloss black, so they manufacture efficiently and you get economies of scale working for you.

Imaging

You can put them farther away from each other than you are from them, and still the center image is rock solid. When you consider the typical demands of putting speakers in a living room your wife will be happy with, GoldenEar offers the best solution to please you both. The ribbon tweeters and powered subs solve a lot of audiophile problems. Most of our customers start their discussion with, “I have a challenging room.” It’s very likely that one of GoldenEar’s models is the best choice for this shopper.

Powered Subs

Keep in mind, the powered models below (from T3+ on up) have high acceleration amps on board to drive the woofers. That means YOUR AMP only drives the tweet and mid drivers. Hence, these towers are over 90dB efficient and can be driven happily by a much wider array of amplifiers than similarly priced passive towers.

Bi-amping makes sense. The woofs have their own dedicated amp. The mids and tweets are controlled by YOUR amp. With this in mind, GoldenEar created the Tritons with powered subs.

There are two fully passive towers in the line. Triton 7 & 5 are just as smooth and beautiful as their bigger brothers. They simply have less bass.

Passive Towers

Triton 7 $1800 per pair (39.75h, 7.25w, 11d)

Ribbon tweet, two 5.25 cast mids in D’Appolito array, two 8” Quadratic radiators. What I love about T-7 is that it’s the FIRST TOWER OUT THERE to get you into a more sophisticated speaker- than the pile of domes and cones that is everybody else out there for $1800. T-7 elevates you from the bourgeois, to a sophisticated music transducer. Its bass is fairly deep- yet not at all FAT.

Triton 5 $2400 per pair (44.25h, 8 1/8w, 12 3/8d)

Ribbon tweet, two 6” cast mids in D’Appolito array, four 8” Quadratic radiators. T-5 provides a larger and more precise musical presentation from T-7. T-5 produces a significantly richer bottom end than T-7. More importantly, T-5 sounds larger and more clear than T-7.

Towers With Powered Subwoofers

Triton 3+ $3000 per pair (44h, 7w, 13d, 800w)

Ribbon tweet, one 4.5” cast mid, one 5×9” powered (800w) subwoofer, two Quadratic

radiators. T3+ is a great choice as a lean tower in stereo, or surround sound. Due to its powered sub and your ability to adjust it, T3+ is an especially smart choice for a condo or apartment, where you can be considerate of your neighbors, OR NOT!

Triton 2+ $4500 per pair (48h, 7.5w, 15d, 1200w)

Ribbon tweet, two 4.5” cast mids in D’Appolito array, two 5×9” powered (1200w) subs, two Quadratic radiators. T2+ is a significantly more powerful and dynamic brother to T3+. T2+ takes you from ample bass, to a much weightier impact. T2+ can start throwing the barbells around your room. T2+ is well worth the step up from T3+. T2+ is the refinement of GoldenEar’s classic T2, which put GE on the map in 2010.

Triton 1.R $7500 per pair (54h, 82, 16 5/8d, 1600w)

T 1.R is simply an amazing speaker! It is the first model in GoldenEar’s REFERENCE LEVEL speaker series.

It uses two 5.25 mid/woofs in D’Appolito config with the Ref Level Ribbon Tweeter. Yep, the Ref Level portion of GE’s line uses superior drivers to the lower portion of the line.

T 1.R uses three 5×9 heavy duty subwoofer drivers, driven by their own 1600w, DSP amp. The crossover is a new balanced design. The new monocoque cabinet with luxurious finish in piano gloss black is quite elegant. 1.R further controls bass with four 7×10 ABRs.

T 1.R is a class shattering speaker! It brings performance to its price range that exceeds just a pile of passive drivers screwed into a box.

Remember, your amp only sees the mids/tweet, so you don’t need an expensive amp to make the 1.R’s sing. You can run NAD’s C328 integrated for only $700 and drive these boys beautifully!

Triton Reference $11,000 per pair (58h, 9.25w, 18.75d, 1800w)

GoldenEar’s T-Ref is indeed a reference level speaker. The size of soundstage T-Ref can deliver is massive. Its powerful bass response also makes it stand out from its passive competition.

T-Ref uses, a new, higher performance REF LEVEL ribbon tweet, two 6” cast mids, three 6×10” powered (1800w!) subs, four Quadratic radiators and solid steel plinth.

The vaunted T-Ref competes with any speaker, at any price. It is big and bold. With a silky ribbon top end and thunderous bass response, T-Ref is the least expensive full range (meaning it DOES have extended low frequency response) speaker to ever earn Stereophile’s top echelon rating. Everything else in the list is twice to twenty times more expensive!

Alexander Blettenberg Wins Big

Alex is a fabulous young (28) pianist/conductor/composer of German/Greek heritage. He just won the Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna. He won $10,000. But more importantly he won a Bosendorfer Model 200 grand piano, worth over $100k. Today he’s a bit richer AND he’s got a state of the art piano!

McIntosh Availability

McIntosh has been back ordered like crazy in the teeth of Covid 19. Any new McIntosh order will run six months or more.

Audio Emporium is a stocking dealer. That means, we order ahead. We don’t just order per sale. We have a fair amount of McIntosh IN STOCK right now, that we ordered more than six months ago. Hence, it’s here, NOW, and available to buy. Why wait six months?

We are typically long on popular integrated amps- among the best values in audio land. We likely will have other models on hand. Give us a call! 414-354-5082.

JL Audio F110v2 Powered Subwoofer, $4000

(15.64h, 12.92w, 17.27d, 71 lbs, 10” JL W-7 Woofer, 1100w amp, Gloss Black)

You already know that JL Audio of Florida makes among the very finest subwoofers in the world. They’re designed and BUILT in their own factory near Ft. Lauderdale.

During the height of C19 JL was so limited in production that we had to wait over six months for orders to arrive. That…is like being out of business. Now that we’re a couple years down the pike, JL is shipping subs in 30-60 days, which we can live with.

We now have F110v2 back on display for the first time in years! We’ve missed it. Here’s why.

First of all the 10” woofer used in F110v2 is JL’s top model, dubbed W7. It is a mountain of a cast driver that makes other subs look comparatively like Tinker Toys. The testosterone of this driver is the heart of JL’s top series, nicknamed the Fathom v2. W7 is broader and deeper than any competitor. Think molten steel instead of a flimsy can.

The massive driver is built in JL’s factory. So what, you say. It’s a big deal cuz virtually everyone else buys their drivers out of a bin from a vendor. The houses making bins of drivers can’t make them to the heft and quality of JL Audio.

F110v2’s cabinet isn’t ginormous. You can fit it pretty easily in your room. It is sealed, not ported. It plays taut, not fat. The 1100w RMS amp on board has a LINEAR power supply. This is a Mack truck of an amp, not a vendored out plate amp like the other guys use.

Don’t believe me? Go to Parts Express and look at the woofers and amps they sell. Then look at some brand names online. You’ll see the same parts!

JL’s crossover is elegantly sophisticated. It allows the sub to stay out of the road when you

want it to. You can even run preamp to sub, and sub to power amp, to save your wing speakers from seeing anything under the crossover point- and you’ll be delighted with no perceptible JL intrusion to the character of your wings.

I’ll save the secret sauce for last. JL employs its own DARO (Digital Automatic Room Optimization) room correction circuitry in its Fathom models. It’s easy to operate and works like a champ! DARO makes your bass integrate as seamlessly as possible with your main speakers- regardless of your room’s proclivity to bulge.

F110v2 is appropriate for most rooms where you want taut bass. But JL makes larger models for those who aren’t demure. It you wanna loosen the concrete of your foundation, go a bit higher in the line.

Another benefit of running an F110 or two is, your wing speakers don’t have to be prodigiously powerful. You can get speakers that sound great but don’t worry much about bass. The money you save with this game plan will allow you to get closer to buying the F110.

JL F112v2 $5000 (18.5h, 15.06w, 17.75d, 100 lbs)

This bigger brother has a 12 with 1800w. If you want a big kick in your system consider F112v2.

JL F113v2 $6000 (19.25h, 16.5w, 19.25d, 131 lbs)

They say bigger is better. In this case, it is. With 13.5” woof and 3000w amp, F113v2 has overtly muscular sound and is the best sub in its category.

JL F212v2 $10,000 (31.96h, 14.92w, 20.39d, 204 lbs)

Well, just get outta the way and let us have some fun! With a pair of 12s and a ferocious 3600w amp, F212v2 is really something special. We’ve sold a pile of these big boys and I have to tell you, they dominate. Yet with their sealed design and Daro, you still have a lot of control over the musical signature.

RIP Radu Lupu (1945-2022)

Internationally acclaimed Romanian pianist, Radu Lupu, has died at 77. Lupu was famously reclusive and wouldn’t grant interviews. He leaves behind a treasure trove of great recordings of the Romantic era, mostly on Decca. The box is already out, 10 CDs for only $47!