Jon Iverson | Jan 13, 2018
The sign up above said GoldenEar Technology, but when I walked in it looked like any normal hotel room. No big banners, black cloth draped along the walls or spotlights. And then at the far end I spotted company president Sandy Gross sitting on the couch and a single bookshelf speaker sitting on a stand. That was it.
But as soon as I introduced myself, Sandy jumped up and starting talking about his new baby, the DigitalAktiv 3. “This is a self-powered, wireless-connected monitor which we expect to be shipping later in the year. It has a 200 watt amp on the low frequency section with two inertially-balanced passive 8″ radiators and a 6″ driver, similar to the one in the Triton Reference. It has a high-velocity folded ribbon which is the Reference ribbon.” The tweeter is driven with its own 60 watt amp.
Gross then explained that amplifiers are connected to each driver directly. “The crossover is a 56 bit DSP. There are tremendous advantages connecting the amplifiers directly to the drivers–we reduce the distortion by an order of magnitude.” This design thus eliminates all the passive crossover components you’d find in a conventional speaker. “With a DSP we can get the drivers matched perfectly in a way you can’t do with a passive crossover in terms of the slopes and phase, which we can get just perfect. We can also correct for any anomalies in the drivers with the DSP.”
For wireless connectivity the speaker supports both Bluetooth and Chromecast built in (to connect to whatever is on your network) and the amps are class-AB. There is also no wire between the speakers to sync them; instead they use a WISA radio link with low-latency, which also offers multi-zone capability (or even one speaker playing two channels at once). And with any Google home device, you could voice control the audio going to the speakers. All that for a projected $2,000 a pair.
Never underestimate the power of a simple presentation.