GoldenEar BRX

LOUDSPEAKER

- JOHN ATKINSON

Loudspeaker manufacturer GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by a team led by Sandy Gross, who over the decades was responsible for a succession of affordable high-performance loudspeakers from Polk and Definitive Technology.1 Gross continued that tradition with GoldenEar: Even the company’s flagship, the Triton Reference, which I favorably reviewed in January 2018,2 was priced a couple of dollars short of $8500/pair. (GoldenEar was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest, in January 2020; Gross continued with the brand as president emeritus.)

When Stereophile Editor Jim Austin asked if I would be interested in reviewing GoldenEar’s new stand-mounted design, the BRX (for Bookshelf Reference X), which is competitively priced at $1599/pair, I was interested to find out if what I had liked about the brand’s floor standing models had trickled down.

The BRX

“Trickle-down” is the appropriate term: The BRX does indeed feature technology from GoldenEar’s Triton Reference. The 6 polypropylene-cone woofer is basically the same as the Triton Reference’s upper-bass/midrange driver, with its cast basket, low-mass voice-coil, and what GoldenEar calls a Focused Field magnet structure, designed to better direct the magnetic flux into the voice-coil gap. However, the BRX’s implementation of this drive-unit has a conventional dust cap rather than the ribbed pole-piece extension featured in the Reference. The BRX woofer is reflex-loaded with a pair of 6.5 flat passive radiators, one mounted on each sidewall so that their reactive forces cancel.