Triangle Color Bookshelf Loudspeaker (Hi-Fi+ 77)

What is it with France at the moment? If there’s a technological innovation in audio, if there’s something new and funky… or just a damn fine loudspeaker, it seems to come from a French brand these days.

Take the new Color range from loudspeaker specialist Triangle. On the face of it, this is a sub-miniature speaker (smaller than a bookshelf, larger than a satellite) designed specifically to appeal to a new generation or proto-audiophiles, without compromising what is needed to make a good sound. So, it’s a good, rigid box with a rear port, with two fine, front-firing drive units and a choice of rich piano gloss finishes – black, white or red are the first out the starting gates, with the promise of more to follow. We went with the red ones.

What’s needed to make a loudspeaker appeal to a generation used to getting their music from i-Products? The speakers need to be small and cute – check. They need to be efficient – check. They need to be fun – check, and rechecked. They also need to be free from the ephemera associated with modern audiophilia – no bi-wiring or finicky sensitivity toward stand, position or cabling. Check once more.

In fairness, the Color bookshelf speaker – called, appropriately enough the Color Bookshelf loudspeaker – is the smaller of two hi-fi/home cinema loudspeakers, the larger being the three way floorstander (guess what that one’s called?) and a similarly eponymous and Americanised centre channel. The ‘Color’ bit comes from the loudspeaker cabinet being finished in a shiny plastic coat of red, white or black (with yellow waiting in the wings). You get a choice of black or white grille for the bass driver in the box, which hangs on via magnets so nothing breaks up the elegant lines. No vivid pinks or vibrant blues (as yet), but the three-strong plus one colour scheme has caught the attention of many.

The Bookshelf monitor is tiny (just 29cm tall), rear ported and single-wired. There’s a slight chamfer around the front baffle, which gives the loudspeaker an even thinner look from the front. It’s efficient (a claimed 90dB, with a relatively tame six-ohm load that never drops below a four and a half ohm minimum impedance). It has a 25mm titanium dome tweeter coupled to a 160mm doped paper cone woofer (both Triangle designs). Like most Triangle speakers, they have crossover points deliberately outside of the all-important midrange, in order to keep things like voices sounding clean and articulate.

In audiophile terms, the Color weigh almost nothing, struggle to reach much below 80Hz and are the sort of small-fry speaker that could be ignored out of hand as being just another rear-channel loudspeaker for a home cinema system. Which would be a crying shame because the Colors are a hidden gem, if anything this red can be ‘hidden’.

Why? Because they are small enough to be effectively a point source, and easy enough to be driven by anything from a tiny valve amp up to something really meaty (Triangle claims 50W power handling, and 100W peaks). They love lightweight stands (the acrylic Quadraspire QX stands were a perfect partner, even though the bottom of the Color is too small for the stands in their normal north-south-east-west arrangement, without some plastic poking out of the bottom of the speaker.

Like most Triangle loudspeakers, they sound their best after a couple of days of semi-vicious tweeter abuse. There’s no need to thrash the speakers to within an inch of their speaker sockets, but after a day or two of music played at relatively meaty levels, the tweeter stops making its presence felt and settles into a very tasty groove. Don’t play this down; it’s a dramatic transformation that takes place over those first few hours of listening. Listening to Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, the tone of his guitar sounded more like a new out of the box Taylor for the first couple of days before filling out and becoming the old Guild he used throughout. The shrill, edgy sound of these speakers when played cold audibly improves with each successive disc for the first few days. After a loud session with AC/DC after a couple of days it changed radically and stayed changed – for the better – throughout the listening test.

After that running in period, the first thing you notice about the Color is its sublime stereo, which is that point source effect in action. The Color’s big thing is not image width, but excellent image depth. It presents a soundstage that projects itself into the room well, but also gives an impression of music being performed behind and even above the loudspeakers. Although not as clear or as refined as an electrostatic design, this expansive, deep soundstage is something more commonly found on tall panels rather than little red boxes.