Triangle Comète 40th Anniversary Edition

Triangle celebrated its 40th birthday recently. As luck would have it, the brand turned 40 in 2020, at a time when celebrating such things was strictly restricted. So, the Anniversary products celebrating that event – the stand-mount Comète and floorstanding Antal arrived at the end of the year after Triangle’s 40th.

It’s not hard to see why these two loudspeakers were chosen to carry the flag for this anniversary. However, they have seen many changes in their long lives. The Antal and the Comète were first introduced in 1994 and have remained popular. Also, while there is a burning temptation for a brand to just ‘max out’ its flagship product or product line (in Triangle’s case, the Magellan line), I admire Triangle for recognising the company’s success was born out of more affordable designs, and many, many people who made Triangle what it is today did so through buying loudspeakers like the Comète, and the Antal.

The ‘standard’ versions of both loudspeakers still exist in the Esprit EZ line, so these two special editions are not simply some recreations of past glory. Instead, the 40th Anniversary edition speakers take what’s made these loudspeakers so enduringly popular and build upon that without making the result wildly more expensive than the standard models.

Clean sheet design

In the Comète 40th Anniversary, Triangle’s engineers took the front-ported two-way enclosure as a starting place and considered almost everything else as a clean sheet. Most notably, the tweeter is a new rose-gold anodised, horn-loaded tweeter with – a first for Triangle – a magnesium dome. It retains the needle-like phase plug of the Esprit series models, which, coupled with the horn-loading, makes for a high-sensitivity 25mm tweeter with well-controlled directivity. Similarly, while the 165mm natural cellulose mid-bass looks notionally like the one in the standard Comète (the most obvious external difference is the colour of the surround trim, with the 40th Anniversary model also sporting some elegant rose gold), it’s a wholly new design with a redesigned suspension and motor.

The larger magnet of the new motor also necessitated a change to that cone; where the standard model is a pure paper cone, this one needs to use more wood fibres in its construction to act as reinforcement without changing the characteristics of the cone or adding significantly to its overall mass. This means the Comète 40th Anniversary retains the same overall 90dB sensitivity and minimum 4.2Ω impedance as the Esprit model but adds a crucial couple of extra cycles to the bottom end and raises overall power handling slightly.

The changes don’t end with the drive units, however. The 40th Anniversary models have more than their fair share of luxury additions to the internal workings of the loudspeaker. The standard cabling has been replaced with the sort of high-end wiring loom you might find in the company’s Magellan flagship. The crossover components are both specially selected and chosen from high-grade suppliers, and the speakers’ sport air-core coils, metallised polyester-film capacitors, and ceramic resistors. Think of this as being like ‘blueprinting’ a car engine.

Triangle loudspeakers tend to set a higher crossover point than many of their rivals, and the Comète 40th Anniversary is no exception. On the rear panel is a metal plate signifying Triangle’s 40th Anniversary in a cursive script. This again echoes the rose-gold touches throughout the loudspeaker and sports a single pair of high-quality, five-way binding posts.

Real tree

The 40th Anniversary models come supplied in one of two real-tree finishes around that HDF enclosure; a light and matte Blond Sycamore and a high-gloss, darker Santos Rosewood. Judging by the Santos Rosewood model we received, this is an exceptionally pretty and well-built loudspeaker, and the finishes perfectly suit the classic lines of the monitor-sized design. The edges are gently rolled to give the loudspeaker a touch of class, making it impossible to see the joins in that real-wood veneer. There is a host of helpful ‘case candy’; feet are designed to mount to the matching stands or rest on more generic or conventional furniture. The matching stands include four plastic bags for mass loading, but being lazy, I used my pre-filled KEF LS50 stands, which did a fine job.

Like many European loudspeaker makers, and to its credit, Triangle recommends the Comète 40th Anniversary be used in rooms of 25 square metres or smaller, making this loudspeaker a strong contender in metropolitan homes where space is always at a premium. Moreover, the loudspeaker’s overall efficiency and impedance plot make it undemanding of the amplifier; it responds well to amplifier ‘quality’ but doesn’t need amplifier ‘quantity’; no heavy-lifting muscle power amps are needed to make these Triangles sing. If anything, this loudspeaker sings sweetest with small, highly responsive integrated amps, especially valve amps.

The Triangle Comète 40th Anniversary is perhaps the perfect flag-carrier of the phrase “life begins at 40” because the first thing anyone says about the loudspeakers is ‘they’re lively.’ Those who like Triangle loudspeakers do so because they are fast and exciting but possess an extremely clean and articulate midrange. This comes across irrespective of musical genre or recording but becomes especially noticeable on drum parts.

For example, the notion that Ringo Starr ‘isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles’ is quickly put to bed when playing the solo from ‘The End’ [Abbey Road, Apple], but it’s actually ‘Carry That Weight’ earlier in that famous medley that shows what the Triangles do so well; here, it’s all about ‘the Ringo Swing’, that swampy high-hat brush that came from a left-handed drummer playing a right-handed kit. Through these speakers, that high-hat sound is energetic and fast enough to define the uniquely Ringo-ness of his playing easily, yet not so energetic to make it too accented. It’s a more direct interpretation of the mix than many speakers make, but not an overly aggressive one. But it does make some of the more universally respected designs sound a bit behind the beat in comparison.

Good bass

The bass is very good given both the loudspeaker and room size recommendations. The speed of the loudspeaker shines through; play ‘The Rat’ by Infected Mushroom [Army of Mushrooms, Dim Mak] and there’s enough bass for most, but the overall performance speed makes you nod your head furiously enough to give you a concussion. Yes, the more dubstep aspects of this album (remember dubstep?) are not given the last morsel of low-end wub-wubbiness required, but in context, deep bass in small rooms is more about window rattling than accurate low-end tones. More authoritative and deep bass would require a lot of bass trapping to keep it in check in this context, and Triangle’s fast, dry bass is a bonus in smaller rooms.

These aspects of performance can be a double-edged sword. One person’s ‘lively’ is another’s ‘ragged’. Similarly, ‘exciting’ can be perceived as ‘bright’. A clean midrange to some might be lacking upper bass weight to others. On the other hand, these descriptors could also describe a dull, recessed, and muddied sound. Having just fitted a saddle to this fence I’m sitting on, I’m happy to report that both viewpoints are correct relative to the individual’s tastes. The Triangle Comète 40th Anniversary is the antithesis of that old-school Spendor BC1 style, with a very laid-back ‘pipe and slippers’ sound. Nothing is wrong with that; they are still highly accurate, just accurate to different parameters.

Peer performance

Most other aspects of the performance are in line with the Cométe 40th Anniversary’s peers. Soundstaging is very good, and dynamic range is good, too, although neither of these components of a good sound is firmly stated in the Triangle sound, so you will not be drawn to the sound if impressive staging or edge-of-the-seat dynamics are what you seek.

With the Comète 40th Anniversary, the company has returned to first principles. This is pure, unadulterated Triangle sound; lively, vivid, exciting, open and expressly detailed in the midrange. And that midrange-first sound does mean some limitations at the extremes, both in some top-end hardness and some bottom-end lightness. But those of us who love the Triangle sound won’t care because that all-important midrange, lower treble and upper bass are so fast and beguiling.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Type: Two-way, two-driver, bass-reflex stand-mount loudspeaker
• Drive units: Horn-loaded gold-anodized magnesium 25mm dome tweeter, custom untreated paper 165mm mid-bass unit, both Triangle’s own designs
• Sensitivity: 90dB/m
• Frequency Response: 47Hz–22kHz ±3dB
• Nominal impedance: 8Ω
• Minimum impedance: 4.2Ω
• Power handling: 90W
• Finish options: Santos Rosewood, Blonde Sycamore
• Dimensions (W×H×D): 20 × 40 × 32.4cm
• Weight: 8.8kg per speaker
• Price: £1,500 per pair

Manufacturer:

Triangle

URL: trianglehifi.com

UK Distributor:

SCV Distribution

URL: scvdistribution.co.uk

Tel: +44(0)3301 222 500

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