Gary Steel
While the industry gets first look/listen to GoldenEar’s new DigitalActiv 3 powered/wireless bookshelf speaker at CEDIA trade show, the public will have to wait just a little bit longer. That is, until some time in 2019.
Witchdoctor has reported extensively about GoldenEar’s almost unbelievable price-to-quality ratio in the past, and especially its tremendous Triton One towers (read our review of those here).
The Triton range has hogged much of the acclaim in recent years, but given the company’s track record, we’re expecting good things from its DigitalActive 3.
There’s not a load of info about the speakers yet, but here’s what we know:
- GoldenEar describes them as “ultra high performance” bookshelf speakers.
- It’s equipped for wireless Wifi and Bluetooth reception.
- It’s housed in a beautiful hand-polished piano black monocoque cabinet.
- It incorporates a 6″ cast-basket bass/midrange driver that’s based on the one in the Triton Reference, along with the same HVFR tweeter and two inertially balanced 8″ passive radiators.
- The active drivers are bi-amped with direct-drive of the bass/midrange driver by a 200-watt Class A/B amplifier and direct-drive of the tweeter with a 60-watt Class A/B amp.
- Direct–drive of the drivers tremendously reduces distortion by an order of magnitude and dramatically improves control of the drivers for tighter bass and improved transient response.
- All crossover functions, including frequency response and phase optimization are handled in the digital domain and precisely tailored by a 56-bit DSP engine.
- Wi-Fi reception is handled by Chromecast, for high quality hassle free performance with all popular streaming services from any Cast capable device such as a smart phone or computer. The built-in Cast module supports both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands for exceptional tolerance to interference.
- When used as a stereo pair, the two DA 3s are wirelessly linked by a high-quality, low-latency WISA radio.
GoldenEar says that “the DA 3 will enable listeners looking for high quality musical reproduction as well as lifestyle friendly simplicity to create a state-of-the-art music system by simply plugging in the two speakers downloading the app and setting up Chromecast. We have selected Chromecast as the wireless connectivity system based on sound quality, simplicity, flexibility, a tremendous and continuously updated feature set as well as robust operation.”
There are a lot of ordinary wireless speakers on the market. Finally, we can hope for some real performance to go with the convenience of powered wireless speakers.
