This is a review and detailed measurements of the Triangle Esprit Antal Ez Floor Standing speaker. It was kindly loaned to me by a local member and costs US $2,400 (pair).
The overall fit and finish is nice:
The tweeter though looks odd and takes away from the clean look as does that sticker between woofer and port. The Antal EZ was quite heavy requiring my son's assitance to lift it on top of the measurement rig and then two flight of stairs to listen to (picture above).
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of roughly 1%.
Testing temperature was around 60 degrees F.
Reference axis for measurements was the center of the tweeter. Grill was not used in either measurements or listening tests.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
Triangle Esprit Antal Ez Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
The most glaring issues are rather rough bass response all the way up to 600 Hz. Post that we also have a number of resonances but overall response is more of less flat on axis which is good. The roughness in the low frequencies was rather odd and unusual. I *think* I have identified that peak around 260 Hz is coming from the mid-range driver. See these near-field measurements:
Same resonance shows in both tweeter and midrange but is much stronger in the latter. Now, that could be low frequency response that gets picked up by the mic in this position. Let's look at the two woofers then:
Notice that the woofer closest to the mid-range shows more of a problem than the one that is farthest (right). All of seems to point to the midrange as the source. But then when we look at the port, we see it strongly there as well:
I am thinking that may still be mid-range bleeding back through the box and coming out the port. What do you all think?
Back to our "spin data," our early reflections are more or less similar to direct axis with some high frequency roll off:
Summing the two spins, we get this predicted in-room frequency response:
Seems like our problem area is from 150 Hz to aforementioned 600 Hz or so.
Impedance was the lowest I have measured at just 2.7 ohm:
You need a proper amp that doesn't mind pumping out current. We also see multiple resonances which we had seen in the frequency response measurements as well.
Distortion goes up around a few of these resonances:
The amount of distortion is unacceptably high for a floor standard at 96 dBSPL. We are used to seeing bass distortion but here, but not well above that in such distinct patterns which should have been investigated. The first mountain centered around 250 Hz coincides with our resonance so definitely a cause and effect there.
Beam width shows narrowing of the response horizontally with frequency which is not all that bad by itself:
I expected better directivity vertically given the inclusion of a midrange:
Hard to sit at a level higher than the tweeter so you may need to pointing down to not fall in that hole around 3 to 4 kHz.
Speaker Listening Tests
The first impression was "this is not bad." Power handling was excellent and I could play very loud with any deep bass break up. Then again, there was not much deep bass.
I brought up the measurements and tried experimenting with equalizations. This is very tricky as the response anomalies are in low frequencies where the room heavily modifies the response of the speaker. So what we see in anechoic measurements above may not be what I was experiencing in my room. First attempt at filling the holes around the 260 Hz resonance was a failure. I scrapped that and just pulled down the resonance and that worked well:
I lost a bit of bass response but I thought clarity improved. I tried to compensate again with boosting some of the other areas around it but it just resulted in boominess so I gave up. You would need to make in-room measurements to do better than I did.
As a way of comparison, I put my Revel M16 next to the Triangle on a stand. While tonality and to some extent clarity was better on the Revel, the sound was clearly localized to a smaller source vertically, leaving a preference for the Triangle for the larger, more realistic image it portrayed.
I replaced the Revel with Infinity R253. The R253 was not a match at all for the Triangle. It sounded puny and weak.
Humbled, I took out the big guns and connected the Revel Salon 2 next to the Triangle.
OK, now were talking sublime sound quality! Wow, sometimes I forget how wonderful the Salon 2 sounds. I spend so much time testing other speakers I don't get much time with them. The Salon 2 naturally had much deeper bass but it was also so clean and tonally smooth that you just couldn't go back to the Triangle. 10X the price and better engineering was of course at play there.
Conclusions
We have a speaker here with some good qualities but also a glaring issue in bass response. It is as if they took an existing design and yanked out a woofer or something and left the rest sort of unfinished. The problems would easily show up in even DIY measurements let alone the (small) anechoic chamber that Triangle shows in their marketing material. It is a shame they did not go after them to fix it as it could have made for a nice speaker.
As is, I can't recommend the Triangle Esprit Antal Ez. Per my listening tests though, with EQ, it can provide an enjoyable experience though so if you own it, it is serviceable.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The overall fit and finish is nice:
The tweeter though looks odd and takes away from the clean look as does that sticker between woofer and port. The Antal EZ was quite heavy requiring my son's assitance to lift it on top of the measurement rig and then two flight of stairs to listen to (picture above).
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of roughly 1%.
Testing temperature was around 60 degrees F.
Reference axis for measurements was the center of the tweeter. Grill was not used in either measurements or listening tests.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
Triangle Esprit Antal Ez Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
The most glaring issues are rather rough bass response all the way up to 600 Hz. Post that we also have a number of resonances but overall response is more of less flat on axis which is good. The roughness in the low frequencies was rather odd and unusual. I *think* I have identified that peak around 260 Hz is coming from the mid-range driver. See these near-field measurements:
Same resonance shows in both tweeter and midrange but is much stronger in the latter. Now, that could be low frequency response that gets picked up by the mic in this position. Let's look at the two woofers then:
Notice that the woofer closest to the mid-range shows more of a problem than the one that is farthest (right). All of seems to point to the midrange as the source. But then when we look at the port, we see it strongly there as well:
I am thinking that may still be mid-range bleeding back through the box and coming out the port. What do you all think?
Back to our "spin data," our early reflections are more or less similar to direct axis with some high frequency roll off:
Summing the two spins, we get this predicted in-room frequency response:
Seems like our problem area is from 150 Hz to aforementioned 600 Hz or so.
Impedance was the lowest I have measured at just 2.7 ohm:
You need a proper amp that doesn't mind pumping out current. We also see multiple resonances which we had seen in the frequency response measurements as well.
Distortion goes up around a few of these resonances:
The amount of distortion is unacceptably high for a floor standard at 96 dBSPL. We are used to seeing bass distortion but here, but not well above that in such distinct patterns which should have been investigated. The first mountain centered around 250 Hz coincides with our resonance so definitely a cause and effect there.
Beam width shows narrowing of the response horizontally with frequency which is not all that bad by itself:
I expected better directivity vertically given the inclusion of a midrange:
Hard to sit at a level higher than the tweeter so you may need to pointing down to not fall in that hole around 3 to 4 kHz.
Speaker Listening Tests
The first impression was "this is not bad." Power handling was excellent and I could play very loud with any deep bass break up. Then again, there was not much deep bass.
I brought up the measurements and tried experimenting with equalizations. This is very tricky as the response anomalies are in low frequencies where the room heavily modifies the response of the speaker. So what we see in anechoic measurements above may not be what I was experiencing in my room. First attempt at filling the holes around the 260 Hz resonance was a failure. I scrapped that and just pulled down the resonance and that worked well:
I lost a bit of bass response but I thought clarity improved. I tried to compensate again with boosting some of the other areas around it but it just resulted in boominess so I gave up. You would need to make in-room measurements to do better than I did.
As a way of comparison, I put my Revel M16 next to the Triangle on a stand. While tonality and to some extent clarity was better on the Revel, the sound was clearly localized to a smaller source vertically, leaving a preference for the Triangle for the larger, more realistic image it portrayed.
I replaced the Revel with Infinity R253. The R253 was not a match at all for the Triangle. It sounded puny and weak.
Humbled, I took out the big guns and connected the Revel Salon 2 next to the Triangle.
OK, now were talking sublime sound quality! Wow, sometimes I forget how wonderful the Salon 2 sounds. I spend so much time testing other speakers I don't get much time with them. The Salon 2 naturally had much deeper bass but it was also so clean and tonally smooth that you just couldn't go back to the Triangle. 10X the price and better engineering was of course at play there.Conclusions
We have a speaker here with some good qualities but also a glaring issue in bass response. It is as if they took an existing design and yanked out a woofer or something and left the rest sort of unfinished. The problems would easily show up in even DIY measurements let alone the (small) anechoic chamber that Triangle shows in their marketing material. It is a shame they did not go after them to fix it as it could have made for a nice speaker.
As is, I can't recommend the Triangle Esprit Antal Ez. Per my listening tests though, with EQ, it can provide an enjoyable experience though so if you own it, it is serviceable.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
