CES 2020

GoldenEar Technology’s Sandy Gross is no stranger to change, having started, and then eventually moved on from, two major speaker brands, Polk Audio and Definitive Technology. As we reported last week , GoldenEar was recently acquired by The Quest Group, owner of the AudioQuest brand of cables, Niagara power products, and DragonFly DACs. With change, of course, comes uncertainty, which is why it was reassuring to walk into the company’s CES suite and see the man himself conducting demos of GoldenEar’s latest speaker, the Bookshelf Reference X.

We previously posted on the Bookshelf Reference X (BRX) in our CEDIA 2019 show coverage . Nothing has changed since we first reported on the BRX, a compact bookshelf model that pairs a folded-ribbon tweeter with a 6-inch cast-basket woofer and 6.5-inch passive radiators located on each side, and it sounded every bit as impressive in the company’s CES demo as it did back at CEDIA. What is news is that the BRX is about to hit the market — I expect to have a pair in-hand sometime over the next few weeks and will be eagerly setting them up for an extended listen.

According to Gross, this CES was probably his last, although that’s less a reflection of his future relationship with the speaker brand he started than a statement on the Las Vegas CES, which has become a literal desert for high-performance audio. There were painfully few audio companies for me to visit in the Venetian tower suites this time around, and I expect to see even less—if any at all—next year. It may be the end of an era, but I’m happy to see both GoldenEar Technology and its golden-ear’d founder keep going.