“Better” can be a tricky thing to ascribe to a piece of hifi gear. After all, what each of us like or prefer is a matter of taste not fact. With that being said, the GoldenEar T66 are my very favorite GoldenEar speakers.
I’ve reviewed two other pair of GoldenEars—the Triton Reference Tower (review) and the Triton One.R (review) and while I enjoyed them both I found the Triton One.R to be bit better balanced, at least to my ears and taste.
From that review:
If we get back to the way hifi makes us feel, memory suggests I connected to my music to a greater degree through the One.R than through the Triton Reference Towers, as the latter may have sounded even bigger and in an even bigger hurry sonically, delivering more drama at the frequency extremes, making the sounds in the middle a bit overwhelmed. The Triton One.R strike me, in these terms, as the better balanced speaker.
The main word that comes to mind to describe the new T66, in terms of looks and performance is refinement. And according to my internal lexicology, more refined = better.
So what’s new, what’s the story with these GoldenEar T66? The Quest Group, AudioQuest is also part of the Group, acquired GoldenEar back in 2020 and the T66 are the first speakers in the new GoldenEar T Series so they have AQ DNA built in. According to GoldenEar, this DNA includes dramatically augmented crossover design, high-quality internal wiring, a new cast-aluminum base and metal grille, and, in addition to GoldenEar’s Gloss Black cabinet finish, a vibrant Santa Barbara Red.
We can easily see some of these changes as the review pair wear that Santa Barbara Red finish and sit on cast-aluminum bases. I will say I greatly prefer this new sleeker look by a country mile and found the old big MDF oval bases on the Triton Towers to be less than attractive, feeling like a temporary fix in need of a permanent solution. The metal grilles on the T66 also up their visual appeal over the old socks, all making the T66 a better looking speaker, and I have a degree in Fine Art (which means next to nothing in this context). Albeit a speaker that’s so slim when viewed straight on it may as well not be there.
The driver complement will look familiar to Triton aficionados as the T66 employs GoldenEar’s reference high-velocity folded ribbon AMT tweeter, two 4.5″ high-definition cast-basket mid/bass drivers, two 5″ x 9″ long-throw quadratic subwoofers, and two 8″ x 12″ quadratic planar back-wave-driven radiators. Those subs are powered by internal 1000W peak/500W RMS, DSP-Controlled amplifiers and the output level is user-controlled by a knob around back. I call it the Fun-O-Meter control and the nice things about knobs is you can turn them up and down. Frequency Response is rated at a healthy 29Hz–25kHz typical (-6dB on axis @ 29Hz, anechoic bass response) with 91dB 1W/1M @ 4Ω (2.83V/1M) efficiency and 4 Ohm nominal impedance. The company recommends 20 – 500Wpc to drive ’em.
The GoldenEar T66 have been living and playing on the Barn’s B-Side for more than 3 months on and off but mostly on. In that time I’ve had the pleasure to hear them play scads of records of all kinds driven by three wonderful integrated amps including the Viva Solista (review), Thöress EHT (review), and Leben CS600X as well as a Bel Canto e.One Pre/Power Stack (review) with the Mola Mola Tambaqui (review) or totaldac d1-unity (review)/Auralic ARIES G1.1 (review) handling digital to analog duties (full system and Barn details).
And I can tell you that it took a matter of just a few songs played through the T66 for me to fall into pure fun mode, where the music guided the mood and playlist day after day and week after week. Sure, I’ve heard speakers that are more resolving, that offer even greater in-room impact, and a more believably dimensional presence but they all cost more, much more, than the T66 if that matters to you and your budget.
Sometimes I wonder if Kim Gordon was the soul of Sonic Youth. And I wonder about this based on the music she’s released post break-up. Which reminds me of old married couples like grandparents or in-laws. When both are alive, you think you have each person in the couple figured out as far as their role in the mix, in the character of the union, in how their individual personalities help shape the couple. But then one dies and, at least in my experience, you find you were all wrong because the survivor exhibits behavior(s) that you ascribed to the other, the one who passed. Then again, perhaps after decades of marriage, or band life, each person adopts aspects of the other’s behavior(s) and they become more pronounced when it’s no longer a back and forth. When it becomes a solo act.
The Collective is Kim Gordon’s latest, released on Matador earlier this month, is a smoldering beautiful brute of a record. Have you seen any of Gordon’s art? Some of her paintings consist of phrases painted with an oversaturated brush, leaving traces of action in the form of drips and splatters like blood oozing from wounds. The lyrics on The Collective feel just as raw, splashed onto oversaturated masses of sound energy with enough funk to feel soulful.
“On this record, I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now,” says Gordon. “This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, convenient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.”
This rawness, this wild energy bordering on the manic came through the GoldenEar T66 driven by the Barn resident Leben CS600X with power, grace, and rage. This is music you want to play loud, and louder still, until you can feel it hitting more than just your ears, like a sonic cleansing meant to wake up our better selves. And the T66 delivered all that as loud as I cared to go in stunning precise forceful form, the kind of convincingly fit and full sound that just feels right. The T66 also pulled a very convincing disappearing act when properly situated in Barn, dissolving away into music. There’s real depth to Gordon’s work once you get past the surface textures and into the deeper meaning which makes me wonder if she was the soul of Sonic Youth.
Show Me The Body’s 2017 Corpus I remains a favorite record for its visceral and varied forms of attack. A number of amazing-in-their-own-right guests join the party including Moor Mother, Eartheater, Princess Nokia, and Dreamcrusher for a bruising, battling 46 minutes. Bass, even deep bass, plays an important role on Corpus I which brings me back to that level knob on the T66’s backside that controls the amount of bass energy allowed through. And I’ll admit that I have a tinge of guilt attached to turning that knob up past seamless to fun as if the accuracy SWAT team are going to blast through the Barn’s roof rapidly repelling to turn that damn bass down!
There are times when I simply enjoy more bass, more grumble and growl, and the T66’s and their pairs of subwoofers powered by 500 Watts of DSP-Controlled amplification coupled with two quadratic planar back-wave-driven radiators per side can dig as deep, as powerful, and as loud as your heart desires. Pleasure, depending on one’s upbringing, can elicit feelings of guilt and I’ll share that listening to “Spit” from Corpus I well into the 90dBs sure felt like a guilty pleasure with bass boosted to Barn rattling levels.
My favorite Bruce Springsteen album is more than one so if you ask me today and again in a month or year or decade you can expect a different answer. I didn’t really get Springsteen’s music until I experienced it playing in bars and clubs and years later live because I was initially put off by its buoyancy. But when I saw and felt the Springsteen effect, like a ray of hope cutting through the stifling gray sameness and boredom of suburban NJ in the 1970s, I was ready to dance. Darkness on the Edge of Town from 1978 is my current crush with its Telecaster crunch leading the way.
When this record arrived, I was in high school and working 5-6 days a week in a furniture warehouse loading trucks after school and on weekends having given up sports so I could buy the things I wanted. And one of the things I wanted were records and the escape they had to offer and unlike Jimi or Jim or Bob or Neil, Bruce was a local guy singing for…us. Or so it seemed.
I have never owned a Fender Telecaster but I’ve played a few and heard more than a few played, Roy Bucannon live at a tiny club is a highlight, and they have a distinct sound that in the wrong hands can feel overdone. For me, Springsteen flirts with that edge but never crosses the line and while his approach is on the straight forward side, he hits all the right notes on Darkness deftly and sparingly.
And that Telecaster crunch, twang, and metallic high gloss glint jumped into the Barn with live-like light and weight through the GoldenEar T66 especially so when driven by the Viva Solista, an admittedly odd pairing price-wise. But sound-wise the Viva oomphed out the T66’s sound with more body, weight, and timbral beef than any other amplification partner. This was big, saturated, badass sound that perfectly complemented “Adam Raised a Cain” and Bruce’s sharp-edged Tele intro. Loud and louder still with all the lights out, I was brought back to those un-glorious days of my 1970s with all that energy and life just waiting for a place to go. I certainly never would have guessed I’d have ended up in a Barn reflecting on it in writing.
The T66 also do delicacy and detail without even a hint of edge or etch. Getting back to refinement, the overall sound image created by the T66 feels more of-a-piece than even the Triton One.R, an improvement that makes music reproduction feel more natural and easier to get swept away within. These combined strengths brought the Nicolás Jaar led album Weavings 2, released on Other People last October, to fragile life in Barn.
From the liner notes:
The concept behind ‘Weavings 2’ remained the same: participants did not rehearse beforehand, and performed in duos and clusters according to a visual score. The ensemble included four artists from the first online Weavings – Aho Ssan, Angel Bat Dawid, Paweł Szamburski, Resina – and Jaar, who also once again mixed the show live. The first-time performers – or Weavers – were Antonina Nowacka, Khyam Allami, Oren Ambarchi, Pak Yan Lau, Raphael Rogiński, Tomoko Sauvage and Valentina Magaletti. The musicians are therefore not only ‘woven’ between one another during a single concert, but some of them between the first and second performances, online and IRL.
…
For ‘Weavings 2’, the concert has been mastered and spliced into individual tracks, and like its predecessor feels like a coherent album, where the sum is greater than its parts. And again, it’s also a document of the pandemic, now examining the period in which we stepped out of our isolation and towards each other.
If you’re familiar with Jaar, Ambarchi, or any of the other fine musicians on Weavings 2, you know they are masters of the infinitely small and this performance that spans over the course of 1 hour and 25 minutes draws you into the subtlest of shadings, the smallest shifts in sound, tone, texture and timing for a hypnotic journey. The GoldenEar T66 brought out the beauty and body of clarinet, cello, guitar, and wordless vocals along with percussion and electronics so that the individual voices, down to the micro-est of movements, were reproduced in delicate full voice lending interplay the grace and gravitas needed to make this lovely music come to life.
I also jumped all over my ever-growing Fun playlist from the Tricky-produced Lonely Guest, to Tara Jane O’Neil’s lovely simple folk-inspired self-titled record from 2017, to Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (cranked to 11), to “There Is No End” from New Age Doom and Tuvaband, to Dynasonic’s deep bass “D3” from #2 (I picked a lot of music with deep bass one night just for the fun(k) of it), and on and on getting deep into the sounds of music without a single distraction related to reproduction.
Which makes me wonder—can a loudspeaker be fun and refined? An odd question for sure but some in our wonderful hifi hobby seem to think fun is a four letter word. So let’s, you and me, let us dispel such silly notions and agree, admit?, that listening to music on the hifi is a pursuit whose purpose is pure pleasure. Listening to music is not a test, it’s not a contest, hell it’s not even a game but if it was a game here’s what I’d say about the GoldenEar T66 tower speakers—they’re a fun and refined winner.
Sometimes a piece of hifi gear’s strengths overwhelm and the GoldenEar T66 hit so many of music’s notes so well, pointing out what they don’t do compared to speakers costing 2- or 7-times more is nothing but a distraction. You can drive the T66 to room-shaking heights with as little as a good 28 Watts and they’ll give you back a full-blooded bountiful sound that does any music you send through them proud, from the delicate to the dangerous. While $7k, or thereabouts, is real money, the GoldenEar T66 deliver as much pure music-inspired pleasure for that spend as any speaker I’ve heard anywhere near that number. Bravo!
GoldenEar T66 Tower Speakers
Price: $6900/pair in Gloss Black, $7200/pair in Santa Barbara Red
Company Website: GoldenEar
Specifications
| Driver Complement | One Reference High-Velocity Folded Ribbon AMT Tweeter
Two 4.5″ High-Definition Cast-Basket Mid/Bass Drivers Two 5″ x 9″ Long-Throw Quadratic Subwoofers Two 8″ x 12″ Quadratic Planar Back-Wave-Driven Radiators |
| Passive Radiator Surface Area | 53.36in2 (344.3cm2) |
| Efficiency | 91dB 1W/1M @ 4Ω (2.83V/1M) |
| Frequency Response | 29Hz–25kHz typical (-6dB on axis @ 29Hz, anechoic bass response) |
| Nominal Impedance | 4Ω |
| Recommended Amplification | 20 – 500Wpc |
| Built-In Subwoofer Power Amplification | 1000W peak/500W RMS, DSP-Controlled |
| Dimensions | Tower: 7.5″ (19.1cm) W x 14.75″ (37.6cm) D x 48.8″ (124.1cm) H (with base, no spikes) Base: 11.8″ (30cm) W x 17″ (43.2cm) D |
| Weight | Product: 60lbs (27.2kg) |
