Tower Speaker Reviews

While the Triton One.R does have a low-frequency level control knob, same as with the other powered towers from GoldenEar I’ve tested I found that leaving it at the default 12 o’clock position resulted in the most linear-sounding bass. This was definitely the case with music, and it carried over as well when I relocated the One.R pair into my home theater for movie-watching. For the latter situation, you simply configure the front speakers in your receiver or processor’s setup menu as Large and select “No” for the subwoofer output option. The main reason why you might want to use the speaker’s LFE input (with the receiver or processor’s own controls handling LFE level adjustment) is to compensate for really large rooms, or ones where the layout necessitates asymmetrical front speaker placement.

Performance
To get a sense of how the speakers sounded in my room during his visit, Gross played a mix of demo tracks he typically uses at audio shows. Thankfully, he left that CD behind. One track, “Nomads,” by jazz bassist Buster Williams, really captured my attention. Listening to it, Buster’s standup bass sounded completely seamless as he wound his way from the highest to the lowest registers of the instrument. Cymbals and piano had a crisp, airy presentation, and a vibraphone floated across the soundstage in a strikingly 3D-like manner during Stefon Harris’ solo. The powerful sense of atmosphere that the One.R speakers conveyed conjured up memories of my time with the Triton Reference, which had a similarly vivid and realistic presentation.

Another thing that captivated me about the Triton Reference when I reviewed it in 2017 was its incredibly transparent rendering of vocals, and the new One.R proved equally adept in that department. Streaming “Stay” from the new Cat Power album “Wanderer” via Tidal, Chan Marshall’s fine-textured voice came through in an effortless manner and stood in solid relief against the piano chords in the background. Pulling out a CD of Push the Sky Away, by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the singer’s deep, upfront voice on “We No Who U R” sounded distinctly fleshed-out, but also well-blended with the song’s female backing vocals.

On a recent road trip, I was impressed by how good some tracks on the new The Beatles (White Album) reissue sounded, even when streamed through my car’s none-too-great stock audio system. I looked forward to returning home and hearing those same tracks. Listening to new mix of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” via Tidal, the panoramic soundscape that the One.Rs rendered was a revelation. Drums and percussion spread impossibly wide to the right and left, leaving loads of space for the piano and George Harrison’s smooth vocals. Eric Clapton’s “weeping guitar,” meanwhile, towered hugely over everything during his solo. The One.R’s vivid presentation of this remixed track left nothing to the imagination—all detail contained in the now 50-year-old recording was brought forth and laid bare.

A full-range tower speaker should be expected to reproduce orchestral works with a convincing sense of dynamics and scale. To confirm that with the One.R, I turned to Mahler’s Symphony No.1 as played by the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by James Judd (Harmonia Mundi CD). Listening to the tentative intro of the symphony’s first section, the delicate, extended scrape of bows across violins cut cleanly through space and the fluttering piano and woodwinds were conveyed with equal clarity. As this section neared its climax, the One.R’s folded ribbon tweeter presented the piercing blasts of brass in a detailed, airy manner, while the slam of the kettle drums and cymbals were appropriately thunderous.

With the Triton One.Rs dispatched to my home theater setup, I didn’t once feel a need for additional subwoofers, even when watching action flicks with ass-kicking DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. The footfalls of the monstrous Kaiju in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, for example, had a window- and bone-rattling punch, along with ample low-end extension. Playing the new Ultra HD Blu-ray of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the eerie massed voices in Requiem, the Ligeti choral work that director Stanley Kubrick uses in the scene where the black monolith first appears on earth, seemed to blast through the room like a windstorm. And when the action cut to a scene where a pre-human creature is bestowed with the insight that bones can be used as tools to smash things, the bombastic swells of brass and kettle drums in Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra displayed even more intense gut-punching slam than what I had heard during the Mahler symphony.

Conclusion
My time spent reviewing GoldenEar Technology’s flagship Triton Reference speaker in 2017 turned out to be something of an event—I had never before had an opportunity to listen with a serious full-range tower speaker in my listening room, and I absolutely liked what I was hearing. To me, the Reference’s $8,498/pair price seemed very fair for the quality and scale of sound that those speakers delivered.

Listening to the company’s Triton One.R in the same space, I have to say I’m even more floored than I was by the Reference. That’s because the new model delivers equally full-range sound, along with many of the same qualities that made that earlier speaker so impressive: clear, fleshed-out mids; airy, transparent highs; and linear, low-reaching bass courtesy of a built-in subwoofer that lends itself equally well to music or movie soundtrack reproduction. The Triton One.R’s more compact form-factor proved to be another plus in my room since it didn’t loom as large and intimidatingly. At just under $6,000/pair, I expect that this formidable new speaker will cut into the company’s sales of the Reference, but I’m sure they knew that going in. If I could pull a Spinal Tap and push the Triton One.R’s Value rating past our usual maximum, I’d do it in a heartbeat.