TRIANGLE BOREA BR03 LOUDSPEAKERS

LOUDSPEAKERS

This small and attractive bookshelf speaker has won more awards than you can point a stick at. Our in-depth review—and full laboratory test— proves why!

Despite its decidedly non-French-sounding name*, Triangle is a completely French loudspeaker manufacturer that builds its speakers entirely in that country, including building its own drivers, of which its famous horn-loaded tweeter with its distinctive gold-coloured phase plug (as used on the company’s topline Magellan model), is the best-known.

Triangle was founded by Renaud De Vergnette in 1980, in the town of Soissons, which is approximately 100km north-east of Paris, and has remained there ever since. The town is one of the most ancient in France and during the Hundred Years War in 1429 was famously liberated by French troops under the command of Joan of Arc.

*In fact, the word triangle is spelled the same in both French and English. It also has exactly the same meaning in both languages: a two-dimensional shape with three sides and therefore three (tri) angles. However the French pronunciation is ‘tree-on-gleh’. The name of the company derives from the fact that De Vegnette’s first speaker, the Model 1180, had an almost triangular front baffle.

EQUIPMENT

The BR03 uses a new tweeter design from Triangle which the company calls an ‘EFS’ system: short-form for ‘Efficient Flow System’. The acronym comes about because Triangle has partially horn-loaded the tweeter’s 25mm silk dome, which improves its efficiency and reduces baffle/grille reflections. It has also fitted a phase plug that corrects phase across the frequency range and also improves dispersion, which in turn means a wider ‘sweet spot’ in the listening room, as well as a more accurate far-field frequency response.

As do most other manufacturers, Triangle makes use of a powerful neodymium magnet to drive the tweeter’s voice coil (and thus its dome) but goes a step further than most by attaching to the magnet a very efficient heat-sink to ensure the motor system remains cool. This is particularly important because the amount of neodymium required in a tweeter is quite small so there’s very little thermal mass. Without proper heat-sinking, such a small mass could quickly heat up and lose efficiency, which would not only affect the speaker’s frequency balance but also its dynamics. Many price-conscious loudspeaker manufacturers do not bother to fit fiddly (and pricey!) heatsinks.

The speaker grille is comprised of acoustically transparent cloth stretched over an MDF frame. Although the frame is a ‘picture-frame’ design, with no cross-struts, so as not to obstruct the output from either of the drivers, Triangle recommends you remove the grilles when listening.

To make this as easy as possible, the grilles attach magnetically, so there is no requirement to press lugs into sockets. The use of invisible fixings also means that when the grilles are removed, the ‘look’ of the front baffle is, as the French would say, ‘ très élégant’. If you could look inside the Triangle BR03’s cabinet you’d find a curious structure that Triangle calls a ‘Driver Vibration Absorption System’ or DVAS. Its aim is firstly to absorb driver vibration before it reaches the cabinet itself and then, secondly, to reduce the cabinet’s ability to vibrate, so that if any vibration does get past the first defence, it’s negated by the second. To do this, Triangle uses what it describes as “perforated internal panels in MDF and EVA foam, thus stiffening the transducer/ cabinet combination and reducing vibration to ensure neutrality and clarity when listening, due to there being no colouration or structure noise.” Essentially DVAS is a bracing system that braces both the drivers and the cabinet walls, but at the same time decouples the braces themselves from both.

The Triangle Borea BR03’s bass/midrange driver cone is made from the same untreated cellulose paper material that Triangle developed for — and uses in — its more expensive Esprit Ez series. The company says it “confers a natural sound with no colouration”.

Although it’s rated with a diameter of 160mm, its total moving diameter (cone plus roll surround) is 140mm and the all-important Thiele/Small diameter is 130mm, for an effective cone area (Sd) of 133cm². Because the cones are untreated, you should not use these speakers in a bathroom or a kitchen, but I don’t imagine that anyone would. (Triangle’s warranty specifically excludes issues related to ‘high humidity’). Speaking of the warranty, Triangle’s Australian distributor, Audio Marketing, gives a five year warranty on all Triangle speakers to extend the manufacturer’s own warranty by three years.

As you can see from the photograph, the BR03 is a bass-reflex design where rather than using just a single port, Triangle’s engineers have used two, each one of which is 40mm in diameter and 105mm in length. This not only gives the baffle a pleasingly symmetrical appearance but also improves its structural integrity and enables the baffle itself to have a smaller area, which improves driver dispersion.

The rear of the speaker has a single pair of multi-way colour-coded binding posts, so there is no avenue for bi-wiring. Four different cabinet finishes are available: Light Oak, Black, White and Walnut.

As for the cabinet size, each cabinet measures 206×380×314mm (HWD) and weighs 6.26kg.

LISTENING SESSIONS

Designed for stand-mounting (on either of two stands made specifically for them, the Triangle S02 or the Triangle S04), but equally at home on bookshelves, Triangle recommends a listening triangle with minimum side dimensions of two metres: that is, two metres between the speakers and two metres from your listening position to each of the speakers. (It also suggests placing them at least 40cm away from a back wall and at least 50cm from a side wall.)

In fact I had great success using the speakers as near-field monitors, placed either side of a computer screen, and also in a larger-than-recommended room, one in which where the ‘listening triangle’ had three-metre sides.

Bass response is a stand-out feature of the BR03s, again aided by that high-efficiency untreated paper cone

You will need to toe-in the speakers slightly differently depending on how far apart they are, but this is no great chore and gives you the ability to ‘tune’ the level of the high-frequency response to suit your personal preference (that is, the maximum treble level will be delivered when both tweeters are aimed directly at the listening position).

As with all loudspeakers, the BR03s sound their best when they are positioned a little way from walls (both back and side) but you might want to sacrifice a little of that imaging and airiness to make some gains in the bass by operating them a little closer to a rear wall. These speakers are designed to best energise rooms with a floor area of between 15 and 30m², but if you don’t listen at loud levels, they will work beautifully well in larger rooms as well. If your room is smaller than 15m², I’d say that Triangle’s Borea BR02 model would likely be a better acoustic match.

The moment I fired up the BR03s I heard why Triangle has used an untreated paper cone, because this speaker is very efficient for its size, meaning that it produces high-volume sound with very little amplifier power. This not only ensures superior dynamic range, even with low-powered amplifiers, but also cleaner sound, since most amplifiers will be operating in their Class-A mode when driving them, because they require so little power.

The very high efficiency also ensures a lively, energetic quality to the sound because the cones can start up so quickly and stop so quickly, due to their low mass. Be careful not to confuse this ‘lively’ sound with forwardness across the midrange — the BR03s are very linear across the mids, as I proved to myself when listening to the Mayo Nakano Piano Trio’s outstanding album ‘Miwaku’. This is a beautifully recorded album that sounds amazing in any of the various formats in which it’s available. Indeed it captures the sound of Nakano’s grand piano more authentically than any other recording that comes to mind. And at the same time, recording engineer Masamichi Ohashi has also perfectly captured the sound of both

Yoshio Ikeda’s double-bass and Takamochi Baba’s unusually-outfitted drum kit.

I also loved the sound of Triangle’s soft-dome tweeter which delivers the sound of Baba’s cymbals wonderfully well. Their output was beautifully balanced against the midrange, and the tone is sweet and pure. Also, being a soft-dome tweeter, there’s not that slightly bright tone right up-top that you get from harddomed tweeters — though you’ll only notice harddome brightness if you’re lucky enough to have perfect hearing.

Bass response is a standout feature of the BR03s, again aided by that lightweight, high-efficiency untreated paper cone. The bass extension is impressive: you’ll likely not hear such deep, extended bass from any other speaker of a similar cabinet size.

It’s also tuneful bass, with excellent pace, timing and pitch definition, so I could easily discriminate between A1 and A#1 which are right down in the lowest musical octave. On the minus side, you’ll easily hear if a double-bassist doesn’t quite hit the note!

My listening sessions coincided with Keith Jarrett’s announcement that he would no longer be performing, which seemed like another good reason to listen to his extraordinary playing and again use the sound of a grand piano to test the limits of the BR03’s abilities. This meant I couldn’t listen to the Köln Concert, with its woefully inadequate piano, so I instead listened to his Carnegie Hall performance from 2006 which includes 40 minutes of repertoire in addition to more than an hour of improvisation.

The Triangle BR03s reproduced the piano sound faithfully, though they were perhaps a little light-on in the lowest octave, as I’d expect from any two-way bookshelf design. Above these very lowest frequencies, the Triangle BR03s very accurately and very precisely reproduced not only the sound of the piano, but also the sounds of Jarrett himself, as well as those made by members of his very unruly audience. These were made more obvious than usual, and reproduced with particular clarity, so the level of detail the BR03s bring to the party is obviously exceptionally high.

Despite being a relatively new addition to Triangle’s range, the Borea BR03 has already won an award from Hi-Fi+ magazine as ‘ Stand-mount Loudspeaker of the Year, Up to £10,000’ plus it was an integral part of the system that won a ‘Best Buy Home Theatre System’ award from the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) which uses expert judges from 29 countries around the world to determine its winners. It was also awarded 5 Stars by UK Magazine What Hi-Fi which noted: “it’s rare to find a pair of speakers at this price that sound so sophisticated, but these Triangles deliver refinement and detail in spades” and declared them “a new contender for best in class.”

I can only add my own praise to that clamour of approval from the experts. If you are intending to spend up to a thousand dollars — or even a bit more! — on a pair of loudspeakers, Triangle’s BR03s should be an essential audition. Donald Bittman

Newport Test Labs first tested the in-room frequency response of the Triangle Borea BR03 and if you look at the result they measured in Graph 1 you won’t need me to tell you that it’s outrageously good. The first thing to note is that the response between 150Hz and 7kHz is spectacularly linear, but indeed the entire response is linear, with the graphed response extending from 70Hz to 20kHz ±3dB.

The second point to note is the spectral balance is perfectly uniform, with the midrange being super-flat and both the lowest and highest frequencies rolling off evenly, gently, and complementarily. There’s no spectral skew that would give the speakers’ sound a unique ‘signature’. The low-frequency extension could be improved if the speakers had been closer to a rear wall, but Newport Test Labs measures small speakers on their stands, two metres from any boundaries. Moving the speaker closer to a rear wall would extend their low-frequency performance. (Triangle claims –3dB at 46Hz).

Graph 2 shows the high-frequency performance of the Triangle Borea BR03 in

much greater detail by ‘zooming in’ and expanding the horizontal scale of the graph (necessarily truncating the low frequencies) and using a measurement technique that not only replicates the frequency response that would be obtained in an anechoic chamber but allows 1Hz resolution across the measured bandwidth. On this graph, the lab has also measured differences between operating the speaker with the grille off (black trace) and with it on (red trace).

You can see that the frequency response returned with the grille off is marginally smoother, but the only real variances are very small discrepancies at 4kHz, 5–6.5kHz, 10–16kHz and 23–33kHz. So yes, you’ll get superior performance without the grilles but the differences are so slight I doubt they’d be significant enough for it to be worth the bother of constantly swapping the grilles on and off. This, however, is something you can easily evaluate for yourself.

The increased resolution afforded by the more sophisticated measurement technique means we can see very small suck-outs in the response at 16kHz, 22kHz and 28kHz. These are very high-Q notches, so would not be audible, because the bandwidth they affect is so small. For example the suck-out at 16kHz (which is more than an octave above the highest note on a piano) only affects frequencies above 15kHz and below 17kHz, plus the maximum dip is just 5dB.

Newport Test Labs measured the low-frequency performance of the Triangle Borea BR03 using a near-field technique, the result of which is shown in Graph 3. You can see that the bass/midrange driver starts rolling off below 100Hz to a minima at 47Hz, meaning you should not expect much bass below this frequency. The output of the port has a very low Q, which is fairly unusual tuning for such a small cabinet, and peak port output is at around 55–60Hz: I would have expected it to peak at below 50Hz, though you can see there’s still appreciable port output below 50Hz.

The impedance graph (Graph 4) shows that the impedance across the audio band (20Hz–20kHz) never falls below 4 and reaches a minimum of 4.2 at around 180Hz. This minimum is exactly as specified by Triangle. Although Triangle specifies the ‘nominal’ impedance of the BR03 design as being 8 , the fact that the actual impedance is lower than 8 everywhere except the three resonant peaks means I would personally have put its nominal impedance at 6 . The impedance above 20kHz (7.5 then rising with frequency) means the BR03 can happily be paired with any Class-D amplifier, while the impedance below 20kHz and the benign phase response (blue trace) mean that this design will be an easy load for any other Class of amplifier as well.

Graph 5 is a composite that combines the various measurements on a single graph and extends the response of the nearfield measurements upwards. You can see there is some unwanted output from the bass reflex port up at 1.3kHz, but it’s quite a ‘way down in level.

Newport Test Labs measured the sensitivity of the Triangle Borea BR03 using its usual stringent test methodology, which tends to favour larger speakers, rather than smaller ones, but the Borea BR03 still managed to deliver 89.5dBSPL at one metre for a 2.83Veq input. This is just 0.5dB shy of Triangle’s specification of 90dBSPL, but it’s an extraordinarily high figure — indeed I think it’s the highest I have ever seen from such a small bass/driver/cabinet combination. This means you’ll get maximum performance from whatever amplifier you use to drive it.

Triangle’s engineers have succeeded in designing a small loudspeaker with an extended bass response and an extraordinarily flat midrange response without making the speaker difficult to drive and at the same time delivering equally extraordinary efficiency. These are all outstanding achievements. Steve Holding

Extended bass response and an extraordinarily flat midrange response