triangle Borea BR03 Hi-Fi Bookshelf Speakers (Black Ash, Pair)

I paired these with a Cambridge AXA35 amplifier, a Cambridge ACX35 CD and various inputs (TV, Pandora, TuneIn, iMac) via an Echo Link and an old iPod. I am blown away by how good this sounds for the money - and how much better this sounds than my old - much loved - hi-fi (an earlier Cambridge Audio amp from Richer Sounds) through Celestion speakers that I left behind when we moved from London to the USA.

These speakers sound good with my Hegel amp . It reminds me like the spica T-50 from the past .

Paired with a great amp, these speakers perform amazingly well. By themselves, their acoustic range is solid. Paired with a subwoofer, its an awesome experience.

I own pairs of each of these: ELAC Uni-Fi UB5 Klipsch RP-600M ELAC Debut B6.2 ELAC Debut B6 Theyre all AMAZING speakers that sound fabulous at twice, three times, and even five times their price tags. None of them is anything less than superlative. Indeed, reviewers have run out of superlatives to bestow on all of them. The original Debut B6 is the all-time, possibly never to be dethroned, bang-for-the-buck audiophile speakers. If you dont have at least one pair of them, you havent lived, my friend! For $279, they simply turned Hi-Fi upside down, utterly reshuffling peoples expectations for affordable speakers. They were easygoing. Laid back. Powerful in the lower octaves. They make every recording sound great regardless of source material or amplifier. Im still speechless at what they did for THAT kind of money. It made EVERY other speaker company up their game. Dramatically. We owe a LOT to those speakers. Possibly the most easy to enjoy, most forgiving and easiest to please speakers of all time. I still use mine to this day, and Ill NEVER sell them. Every other speaker on this list exists SOLELY because of the ELAC Debut B6. Without them to show us all whats possible, for less than 4 or 5 figures, not many people would be getting into the Hi-Fi hobby/way of life. We owe Andrew Jones a debt of gratitude for designing them. The B6.2 had a bit more grown up sound. Simple as that. Lots of goodness there, and a bit more classy. And easier to position closer to the front wall because of the front port. The Uni-Fi UB5 brought affordable Hi-Fi to a whole nother level again. A true 3-way speaker with a coherence and holographic soundstage that leaves you breathless. Voices went from merely gorgeous to the point of being kissed on the eyelids by angels. Youve not heard voices sound like this, if you dont own a $3000-$5000 pair of speakers. Just make sure you have a GOOD, powerful, high-current amp to drive them, as theyre not sensitive, and theyre 4 ohm speakers on top of that. Theyre a glass of Châteauneuf-du- Pape, for ones who appreciate perfection and class. They arent for people who prefer cheap beer and professional wrestling. The ELACs never put a foot wrong. Their Hugo Boss suits never have a wrinkle, nor do their Ferragamo loafers have a scuff. They point their pinkies. Theyre accurate. They have a pinpoint placement in the soundstage. But it takes a LOT of clean power to get them to drop the classy act and just light the place up, which theyll do if you ask nicely. And give them gifts. Known as low-distortion, high-current, high-wattage amplification. Remember: you dont get the most beautiful woman to settle for a ride in your 1985 IROC-Z, a six-pack of Bud Light and some cold McDonalds fries, nor can you feed that to these speakers and get away with it. Bring out the Porsche, the medium rare filet mignon, and a Vega Sicilia 1989, and youre golden. (You also get rewarded with ludicrously low, detailed, and powerful bass.) The RP-600M killed all the preconceived notions that horn speakers are shouty and harsh. Good GRIEF, did they ever! And they did it with ANY amplifier. And they are always ready to have FUN. So engaging, refined, and...LOUD. Not very much bass, but did I mention that theyre fun? Id say theyre a really fine tequila. No salt or lime (or courage) needed. Plenty of flavor. Very effective. Lovely to sip in small amounts. But its ALWAYS ready to join you for five more shots, get crazy, trash the hotel room, and jump from the 5th-floor balcony into the pool WHENEVER you say the word. (In an experiment, I ran just the pair of them in my theater room, which is 35x15 feet. I set them on top of my main towers, told nobody that it was ONLY them playing, and they practically flexed the windows with output. Nobody believed me when I told them that I was only running a pair of bookshelves, until they walked over to them. Stunning. Ludicrous. FUN.) Enter the Triangle BR03. Put simply, its basically ALL of the best attributes of the others, but with little no none of the drawbacks. It makes recordings bring you to tears if theyre great, but doesnt punish you for bad recordings. Its presentation of the soundstage is in front of the speakers rather than at or behind them (but not as far forward as the Klipsch), and startlingly real. Its almost creepy. Like you can reach out and touch it-kind of realism. Not quiiiiite as shockingly real as the ELAC UB5, but close enough. Its got class in spades, AND it can party like a rock star. It can play as loud as you want, and it doesnt demand fancy components. There are 2 caveats. To wit: 1) A new pair of loafers needs to soften and mold to your feet. The engine on a new Audi RS7 needs the right number of revs for the right period of time, in order to have all the moving parts get bedded in and seated in their permanent operational positions. A new house needs furniture, beds, and pictures on the walls (and time) for it to feel like home. These arent imaginary concepts. These arent magical, esoteric fairy tales. These are facts. The same is true of the moving parts of a speaker. Trying to reduce it to mere test numbers on a graph doesnt measure what your ears tell you. So, back to the BR03. Right out of the box, they are BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT, and the bass is merely good. This is not only fine; its also as normal as can be. Put on some good source material with plenty of vocals and cymbals for the mids and highs, crank it up, and give them 2 or 3 hours of a good workout. No, you dont need 100 hours. Yes, theyll continue to sound better, warmer, fuller, and less brassy the longer you play them, but 2 or 3 hours of loud-ish vocals and percussion will get them to open up to where you can get the proper idea of how these sound. This brings the brightness down to a still airy, but revealing and beautiful level...and it sends the bass into the stratosphere. I turn off my subs for music listening, and I had to go check the power switches on my subs. TWICE. Its ludicrous what these speakers can do down low. Youll be dumbstruck. That, or youll laugh like a right bloody idiot. Or both. For the woofers, instead of playing bass-heavy music that I find disgusting and repugnant, I skipped the middle man, and I dialed up a test tone of 25 Hz, turned the volume DOWN, then slowly adjusted it to where the woofer cone was giving me about 8-10mm of excursion, and MOST CERTAINLY NOT bottoming out nor making ANY type of untoward noise. I did this five times, at one minute each time. Again: DO NOT do this at high volumes. The result? Ooooooooh MAN. So very, VERY sweet. And POWERFUL. So DO NOT judge them on the very first notes that come out of them. Even just half an hour makes a difference. The first full week you have them, theyll transform from great to AMAZING. 2) Play with the placement. If you do it correctly, youll have a perfect sweet spot that spans the entire sofa (not just the middle seat), and the best part is that THE SPEAKERS WILL COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR. You wont be able to discern ANY sound coming from either of them. Ill tell you how I achieved that. Ive got two wonderful children, so I HAD TO put them on actual bookshelves, right up against the front wall. Everybody will tell you that this is the wrong place to put your speakers. And they would be right. Generally speaking, your speakers are at the front of the soundstage and the front wall is the back of it. Spatially, thats how it sounds. In a perfect world, you should have these on stands, roughly 2 to 3 feet out from the wall. But I couldnt do that. Also, the bass gets radically stronger the closer they are to the front wall. These are so bass-rich, it might be too much for some people. You can fix that with a little bit of EQ, but I myself dont mind at all. The key to this all...is angling them inward. I learned from The Legend himself, Mr. John Strohbeen (and from New Record Day on YouTube, which has a speaker placement and soundstage tutorial that is amazing) that you can make a HUGE, wide sweet spot where the speakers vanish and all you hear is music in your room...By playing with some radical amounts of inward-angled toe-in angle. So Ill make this quick and easy: put your speakers 9-12 feet apart, and angle them in at about 45 degrees. Yes. You read that correctly: 45 degrees. First, try your speakers firing straight out into the room. Theyll sound great, but the sweet spot will be in ONLY the one central seating position, and youll likely still be able to discern sound coming from the speakers. But then try this: Angle the speakers inward at such an angle that the LEFT speaker is aimed directly at the next listening position to the RIGHT of the central sweet spot position. Then aim the RIGHT speaker directly at the next listening position to the LEFT of the central sweet spot position. Next, it would be a good idea to hold on to your hat, because itll be blown away. Along with your mind. So buy a pair of these. Let them get a little exercise. Warm them up, so to speak. Then set them up correctly, put on Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat or Lyle Lovett Joshua Judges Ruth, and be amazed. Youll be changed forever. Believe the hype, folks. Today, in September of 2020, these are the best affordable speakers on the market. p.s. If you want one of the single best system tweaks I have EVER found, get a vacuum tube preamp. But not just any. Get the Schiit Vali 2+. And get an Electro Harmonix 6922 tube, or a Sovtek 6n1p, right here on Amazon, for less than $30. Theyre dual triode tubes, and most everybody finds them to be THE best way of getting a positively MONSTROUS soundstage in width, height, and depth, or razor-sharp stereo imaging. In short, you get thousands of dollars of genuine single-ended-triode tube sound out of your existing amplifier. For next to nothing. Genius. Hope this helps!

I bought the Triangle BR03s from another site which sell these at a big discount pretty regularly hoping to feed my newly found craze for budget audiophile gear. Prior to this, I had been largely content with my DefTech SM 450s and SM 55 in my home theater setup. Recently, I had starting upgrading my home theater system piecemeal with Polk LSiM 702 surrounds, Klipsch RP-280FA for Fronts, 450C for Center, R-41M for middle heights as they became available on sale and finally 2 x SVS PB-1000 Pros for subs. I then started looking for something hi-fi for my office den for listening to stereo music when I came across these as highly recommend and bought this. They definitely deserve the high praise in terms of fidelity, but I often found the sound too thin and fatiguing with different amps, the best of which I have is the 100w Class A/B Dayton Audio HTA100BT tube amp which already was toning the speaker down. I had originally been a bit disappointed with the Polk LSiM 702 as I barely had any juice on my Denon X3200W to drive them, but they started to shine really well as I got better external amps to drive them and they turned out to be just as high fidelity as the BR03 but without the fatigue and a punchier bass. I soon swapped my BR03 with the Polks with the former now relegated to surround duty. Given my experience above, I would say that if you are looking for non-fatiguing high fidelity speakers for smallish areas, I would definitely recommend going with the Polk Reserve series (R200 in particular as the successor to the LSiM series) and you should not be disappointed regardless of the room size. I say this as someone who absolutely loves the Klipshs brightness and clarity for movies, but not for music.

I really like these speakers for Jazz, Folk, Acoustic etc....I do not enjoy loud hard rock through them...just not their thing. But if you appreciate tonality, these little guys have it for miles. Mine are partnered with two SVS Pro SB1000s.

The Triangle Br03 are incredibly good speakers for the money. The highs and lows fill the room such detail and sound staging is very good. The quality of the speaker is very good as well. The only thing I can hope for is that they last for many years.

saw these in the Wirecutter column. they bring out sound my Klipsch bookshelf speakers didn’t. the depth of the cabinets seems to increase the bass. I don’t even bother with a subwoofer now. emailed Triangle about running 100W per channel through these & they assured me no worries. VERY PLEASED.

I reviewed speakers for months before my purchase. Ive had these now for two months and couldnt be more satisfied. Even though they did not have enough base for the reviewer Joe and Tell, they have more than enough for my taste. So I would guess if you are a basehead, these are not for you. I love the clarity of these speakers. I also purchased the center speaker and together they have fantastic vocal output. For someone who wants more than boom, boom, boom, from their speakers, these cannot be beaten by anything below a $1000 bucks.

For the money, these are some crazy good bookshelf speakers. I’m in heaven listening to everything from Brahms Symphony in E Minor to Sza’s new album, in perfect digital clarity. They sound great playing Beatles albums or chamber music on vinyl, too. They have enough bass to 100% satisfy me for classical, jazz, R&B and EDM. Drake and other hip-hop: it’s exciting and fun to listen to, but I’d add a sub if I wanted to truly hear the lowest bass notes. They sound smooth, clean and buttery. There’s plenty of muscle there — my friends were laughing in disbelief when I maxed out the volume — but it’s never an ugly sound. If anything, they sound a lot better when they’re turned up loud. They’re a far cry from PA speakers, soundbars, and basic Sony stereo speakers. For a little more money, you’re stepping into the world of fine speakers, appreciated by music connoisseurs. I don’t usually write reviews, but this product has brought so much joy to my life that I simply had to. I’m a professional musician, but I’ve never enjoyed sitting down and listening to music like this.