Dan Worth takes a listen to the Goldenear Triton 5 floorstanding loudspeakers which for £2300 looks at face value to be a lot of speaker for the money.

The Goldenear Triton 5 is a slim, wholly passive floor-stander just over a metre tall, which sits in the brand’s flagship range between a smaller passive floor tower – the Triton 7 – and four larger semi-active systems equipped with powered subwoofer sections. Each is the lovechild of Sandy Gross, the founder and protagonist-in-chief of the Goldenear brand. I’ve never met him but having met the T5, I feel I know him. Not just by the complex way the T5 is engineered, but also how it behaves in-room and in different systems, and from reading the enormous amount of biographical/philosophical information on the web.

After 40 years of refining his formula through instrumental roles at Polk and Definitive Technology (many of whose speakers I’ve owned), the things that make a great sound for Sandy are obvious in every Goldenear speaker. I know he wants smooth detailed high frequencies, a wide even mid-band and low frequencies that belie the dimensions of the cabinet, and I realise that Sandy and his team have taken enormous trouble and skill to engineer these attributes into speakers you can live with at a price you can afford. There’s certainly great passion behind the brand, but does all this belief actually succeed in creating the ideal audiophile bargain?

For many, especially on Goldenear’s home turf in the US, the answer is yes. Across the pond in the UK and Europe however, the reaction has been mixed. Why does this brand so clearly divide opinion? My search for an answer led to Goldenear’s UK distributor Karma-AV, who provided the passive Triton 5s as the best introduction to the experience and it was certainly an experience – but more of that later.

DESIGN

On first encounter with the T5 it’s obvious you’re dealing with an unusual design. There’s nothing standard about a speaker covered head-to-toe in a stocking like a shroud, which conceals the drivers and their configuration completely. Unlike virtually every other speaker, it’s not easy to suss the architecture. You can’t remove the ‘grille’ because there isn’t one. Instead, you need to lift off the glossy plastic top cover, remove a grip clip securing the top of the stocking and then peel it back down the length of the speaker to the base. The manual that came with the T5s doesn’t even mention this enclosed grille design – it’s as if Goldenear doesn’t want you to meddle. However, rather than a pre-finished look, I discovered a sculpted polymer baffle beneath: obviously the brand has prepared for the possibility of sock removal. Weirdly, with the drivers on show, I felt happier and also a little less anxious about leaving them set up in my listening room with a marauding cat at large: the T5s could well be the most expensive scratching post on the market.