Another small Canadian company seeks to extend our knowhow of how a small speaker should behave.

The Triumph Signature is the smallest of this Toronto company's loudspeaker lineup, a lineup perhaps better known for its medium-large floorstanding speakers. It is also, in our view, the most interesting. Making a good large speaker is such a major challenge that few companies really do it successfully. A smaller speaker has more of a chance of being truly musical, and for that reason making one is a more interesting challenge.
     And although the list price of this speaker is not really breathtaking, considerable care has been taken in its design. Its sheer weight is unexpected for one thing. The cabinet is made of 25 mm MDF, tuned to a relatively high frequency of 350 Hz. Company literature says no internal damping material is used, though in fact a panel of synthetic damping material can clearly be seen through the port.
     The company says it experimented with even denser materials, including granite, but concluded that the fundamental resonances of dense panels were nearly impossible to damp out.
     The woofer is a 16.5 cm unit with a mineral-filled polypropylene cone. The tweeter uses a silk dome, and is modified by Coincident by the addition of damping material in the rear cavity and extra ferrofluid for cooling.
     There exist two philosophies of crossover network design. One philosophy is to filter the frequencies extremely sharply, so that neither the woofer nor the tweeter is called upon to reproduce sounds way out of its natural bandwidth. The other--to which Coincident subscribes--is to make the filtering very gradual, thus avoiding a disconcerting change of timbre around the crossover point, and also avoiding the ringing and the loss of dynamics that some complex crossovers can bring. The Triumph's crossover is of simple first order design, filtering at 6 dB/octave, using air core inductors and good quality polypropylene capacitors...rare in this price range. Properly executed, such a crossover can give superb results, but of course the two drivers need to be able to cover a wide frequency range without strain.
     Our speakers came in very attractive red-tinted cherrywood (black is the other available color). The thick front baffle is heavily bevelled to minimize diffraction about the edges. There were no protective grilles, though audiophiles with inquisitive children can order grilles that fasten with Velcro (free on demand, $35 US for a retrofit). There is only one pair of connectors, a reasonably good pair of gold-plated binding posts that stayed tight on a spade-equipped cable. Note that the holes for banana plugs are in the rear buttons, so you need to tighten the posts properly to get a good connection to the bananas.
     The tuned port is surprisingly tiny, making the speaker look from the rear like a luxurious bird house. There can be a problem with tiny ports: on loud low-frequency notes they tend to "sing." We've noted this even on the 3a MS5 speakers in our Alpha reference system (the design was later altered for that very reason).
     We ran up close to 100 hours on our Triumphs, and then moved them into our Alpha room...

Would you like to read the full text, with illustrations, of the review of the Coincident Speaker Research Super Triumph? Click here to order the print edition of UHF No. 57.