Company Overview

If you mention Sandy Gross to anyone in the audiophile community most, if not all, will recognize the name. Sandy has been in the speaker business since the early 70s with brands like Polk Audio and Definitive Technology. But being asked Sandy will definitely say his favorite brand that he has created would be GoldenEar. Sandy started GoldenEar in 2010 as a response to the homogenization happening in the speaker business then. Sandy wanted a speaker company that offered revolutionary engineering breakthroughs, high standards in sound performance, styling, and value to the listener. Sandy’s GoldenEar company brought out their first products soon after to great acclaim offering a different approach to speaker design. It was important to Sandy to offer a powered bass section in their flagship speakers so that the speaker would sound great with lower powered tube amplifiers (Sandy’s favorite) or higher powered solid-state power. Since 2010, GoldenEar has won many awards for both sound and value with an extensive model line for about any budget. The T66 will be GoldenEar’s first new speaker since AudioQuest purchased them in 2020 and also the first speaker not designed by Sandy himself.

Packaging, Design, & Build Quality

The GoldenEar T66 are fine examples of quality design and manufacturing. The cabinets are both extremely rigid and well-finished having 50% more bracing than their past designs for less cabinet distortion. For the first time in GoldenEar’s 13-year history, you get a choice of finishes. There is the gloss black finish that GoldenEar is known for as well as a gloss red finish, which to us, is a welcome addition. The new finish gives people more options, especially for listeners that want something other than black, which seems to be the color of choice for many brands.

The new mesh grills are another notable addition as they allows the user to fully see the drivers but also protect them. This mesh grill gives the T66 an upscale appearance while having no negative impact on sound quality.

Setting them up is a breeze allowing you to choose to use either one set of speaker cables or two if bi-wiring is the direction you want to go. This is a big deal as this is the first GoldenEar speaker with dual binding posts. The binding posts are of high quality and use AudioQuest’s Bare Naked jumpers between the posts for the best connection. You can use either banana or spades on the posts, which give the user options to use any of their favorite speaker cables. Right beside the binding posts are both the subwoofer LFE connection and a subwoofer level control. This allows adjusting the powered bass section on each individual speaker for the best level match to the system. The LFE RCA input allows the user to utilize the powered bass section to double as their dedicated subwoofer should they want to connect a theater processor or AVR. These options are great knowing many of us have systems playing double duty in our homes for music and movies.

Features & Technology

Given that in today’s world people are using their audio systems for many different things, we at Audio Advice love to see products that can fit many scenarios. The T66 has many capabilities and technologies to allow it to thrive in many environments. For one, the T66 has individual volume controls for each speaker’s bass section. This allows the T66 to fit in many different room configurations while lessening the chance for bass anomalies to show up. So if you have a room that is not symmetrical or “perfect” for audio playback, you still can dial in the speakers for peak performance. GoldenEar utilizes an Analog Devices 56-bit DSP chip in each speaker's subwoofer amplifier in order for the bass section to stay in line with the midrange and high frequencies.

The Tweeter in the new T66 speaker is the same tweeter used in the Triton Reference speaker and it is GoldenEar’s best tweeter to date.

This Folded Ribbon AMT tweeter utilizes high-quality wool felt strategically placed on the tweeter mounting plate in order to minimize diffraction from the edges of the cabinet for cleaner and smoother treble reproduction. The 4.5” cast basket mid/bass drivers are similar to the mid-drivers GoldenEar is known for with a couple of improvements. The new drivers have an improved yoke assembly to minimize distortion and use a multi-vaned phase plug for an improved off-axis response.

The crossover in the T66 has been augmented by AudioQuest’s own burn-in machine for the capacitors for reduced dielectric noise and wide-bandwidth linearity. AudioQuest cabling is also used throughout the speaker for increased sound quality.

The bass section drivers are two of the 5”x9” quadratic subwoofers that GoldenEar also used in their Triton series. These drivers are mounted one high and one low in the cabinet in order to couple better with the two 8”x12” quadratic infrasonic radiators. These bass radiators allow the bass section of the T66 to reach deeper in the bass (29hz).

While the T66 honors Sandy Gross’s design philosophies, GoldenEar also put their years of knowledge and learning into making notable improvements in the speaker’s design with newly designed cabinets with better bracing and much better aesthetics, improved midrange drivers, and more refined crossovers.

Performance

We like to use a variety of music in order to put a speaker through its paces. The T66’s were featured at this year's Axpona event in Chicago where we did the majority of our testing. The system used for the evaluation had the McIntosh MA352 2-Channel Hybrid Integrated Amplifier or the MC275 tube integrated amplifier getting music from an MDA200 DAC and MCD350 CD player.

Oscar Peterson “We Get Requests” is a great album for those of you that like club-style jazz. You Look Good to Me is a favorite song off the album and is great to test a speaker’s ability with true instrument reproduction. The beginning of the song features a double bass being played by a bow on stage right and shows both the resolution ability of the midrange and bass drivers as well as driver integration. This gave us reassurance that the T66 has a well-designed crossover and drivers that work well together. The piano is center stage and behind the other players. The drums are stage left and a great system will allow you to hear the individual brushes hitting the drum heads and cymbals. In fact, the T66 was detailed enough to hear the drummer quietly singing along while playing on some of the tracks on this album. This was a very impressive performance knowing that while these speakers are not inexpensive, they are much less expensive than many other floor-standing speakers on the market at this performance level.

Julian Lage’s 2022 album “View With A Room” is a great example of exemplary guitar work and musicianship. The T66 allowed us to hear every guitar player in its own space with the drummer and bass player behind them on the stage. Every song seems like its own story and the GoldenEar T66 allowed the music to tell it. This album has everything from great studio work, dynamic swings, and good stage placement to show if a speaker has the goods to make the most of this music. The T66 did not disappoint with its ability to soundstage and image, and get the dynamics right (only being beaten in this regard by larger horn-type speakers). About the only thing that the T66 did not do as well as we would have hoped for with this album was image depth. In fact, stage depth in general was not as deep as some other speakers we have heard but the detail and layering within the depth it did give was excellent. We think more than anything this has to do with the fact that the powered bass section is in the speakers themselves facilitating the need to have them a little closer to the room boundaries for bass production which does not allow far enough placement into the room for the deepest staging.

Carole King and James Taylor’s album “Live At The Troubadour” is a great album to test a speaker’s ability with a live performance and male and female vocals, from the hard-driving Machine Gun Kelly to Fire and Rain, both Carole and James’s vocals had clarity and focus on the T66. When the stage was shared by both singers the T66 was able to give each of them their own space on the stage showing the imaging ability of the GoldenEars. At times, live albums have the ability to have an in-your-face type of quality to them. This immediacy and sometimes overbearing quality is what gives live albums their charm. Some speakers do well with these surprises and others just kind of go out of control and get bright. The T66 kept its composure and had headroom to spare when things got going which was impressive for its size and price.

Overall Recommendation

There are a lot of speakers out there. Some of them are small enough to fit anywhere but suffer from sounding small and dynamically lacking. Then there are speakers that you have to build the room around because they are so big. While they do dynamics well and provide a huge soundstage, they take up a lot of room and do nothing to improve the room's aesthetic. While there are people out there that love both of these extremes, there are also people who believe a speaker should be able to sound good with all the music they listen to, do justice to every metric that a speaker is measured on, and fit into about any living room utilizing science and technology to help them sound their best. GoldenEar has spent years perfecting its formula for getting large speaker dynamics, and small stand-mount speaker imaging and soundstaging (only losing the last bit of stage depth due to the design). The T66’s 91dB sensitivity means it can sound good from as little as 20 watts of tube power all the way to 500 watts of tire-shredding solid-state muscle, making a product that keeps getting more attractive with each new model while being priced within grasp for most working audiophiles. We strongly recommend the GoldenEar T66 to anyone looking for a slim, attractive, and great-sounding floorstanding speaker.