I wasn't there, but have watched every stitch of youtube video posted to date. My audio phriends Steve from GT Audio Works and Pete of Triode Wire Labs were there as vendors.

If you watched the "The Listening Chair with Howard Kneller" series of (excellent) video coverage he did of the show, clearly this was an amazingly high-end show (performance and dollar wise).

So what does this have to do with GoldenEar?

Well, there were three speaker commentary that caught my attention. I forget the brands, but for sake of this post it doesn't matter. Suffice it to say the three models are all way more expensive than GoldenEar products.

One speaker designed arranged two ribbon tweeters between two midrange drivers, but the designer indicated this was not a D'Appolito arrangement. This is interesting as I thought that type of configuration was always considered a D'Appolito arrangement, which is the case of the Tritons.

There was another set of speakers that featured an aluminum cabinet. When the designer knocked on the cabinet, you could hear how "dead" and "solid" it was/is. I had a phone conversation with Sandy a few years back and asked him what else he could have done with the Triton Reference to make it "better". The first thing he told me was that he would change the cabinet from the current MDF to aluminum. I asked him why he didn't do that. He answer to me was that instead of the MSRP being $4,999 (which was the case at the time and has since increased) per speaker, the MSRP with an aluminum cabinet would $49,999 per speaker (that's right, $45,000 more per speaker).

There was another set of speakers from Lansche which features a corona plasma tweeter. Sandy has gone on record to indicate this is the best type of tweeter possible. I found out some more about this type of tweeter, and cannot get past the fact that it's lifespan is rather short; just a few thousand hours. Interesting though that a plasm tweeter can extend to 150KHz, far surpassing a super tweeter. Hypersonic sound does matter. I have read a science paper that indicates that while human hearing cannot extend past 20KHz, when hypersonic sound is present with other sounds that we can hear, it makes a big difference.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying my Triton Reference. in my system they sound phenomenal!

Best.

Hal