BOREA BR03 CONNECT SPEAKERS FROM TRIANGLE 

A pair of powered speakers from France, Paul Rigby tackles these fully-featured standmounts, based on the original passive Borea designs 

And that’s not an overly common practice. To produce a pair of passive speakers – in this case priced at £429 – and then to release a powered version of the same, priced here at £649. Although the bass ports on the passive version sit on the lower front of the cabinet and the upper rear on the wireless Connect versions. That is because the Connect’s built-in amplifier takes up too much room at the bottom of the cabinet. 

Even so, I quite like the idea because, doing that very thing, at least you are (hopefully) taking on board a well-designed, neutral and balanced design to work from. That is, depending on the design of course, you should have a nicely configured speaker design as a basis for your new powered speakers. You can hit the ground running with the powered variant, as it where.

The Borea BR03 Connect speakers are neat, good looking designs with a 160mm midbass paper driver and a EFS waveguided 25mm fabric-domed tweeter sitting above. 

Those drivers sit within a cabinet spanning 206 x 360 x 314mm. The master speaker with all the controls built in weighs 7.3kg while the slave unit is a little lighter at 6.6kg. A supplied 3m speaker cable connects the two.  

That is, you have a Master speaker that contains the amplifier where all the sources are connected, the signal is sent to the second speaker via that 3m speaker cable provided and that’s how you control and hear your speakers. 

Inside the cabinet is a host of tech providing you with a variety of connectivity options including a built-in phono amp, supporting Moving Magnet, Bluetooth supporting aptX HD at 24bit/48kHz, HDMI for AV use, USB providing support up to 32bit/384Khz or DSD 256 for computer use, for example. Optical coax, subwoofer output and a RCA 3.5mm port are also included. 

That lot is powered by a Class D, 60W amplifier into 8 Ohms and controlled by a supplied remote control. 

This is all good stuff and I like the basic setup. Do I have any issues with the speakers at this stage? Yes. Yes I do but those problems I have with the Borea BR03 can be grouped to a lack of attention to detail. As you know, that is where the devil lives. Small details are critical. These are the things that can get under your skin and irritate. So irritations then, other than major issues. 

For example, the remote control offers tone controls. I would have liked to have seen physical versions of the same on the actual speakers because the remote control tone control settings are confusing. You have no idea how much bass or treble you are adding or have added or removed via the remote. You can become confused very quickly. Yes, you can use your ears, sure. But it would still be nice to see a visual gauge.

You also get a bass boost option which performs as you might expect. Trouble was, bass boost immediately kicked in out of the box when I was warming up these speakers – in fact Bass Boost is on whenever you turn on these speakers. That was bad enough but, in addition, it sounded horrible, to be frank, at high volumes. Bloated and boomy.  

Saying that, I can see the boost being of use for AV or for low volume, near-field use but not for general 2-channel use and not set at default because it gives the wrong impression, out of the box, to users who might be raw beginners or are just not used to the quirky nature of HiFi settings. I can even see bass boost being left as a default by raw beginners and those same people disliking their overall user experience because of it. Purely down to a misunderstanding. 

I was also not a big fan of the manual that I found online, not in the box. The manual is generally fine but not exactly meticulous, freely mixing up terms like ‘factory settings’ and ‘default settings’ on the same subject which was confusing when read, being open to misinterpretation. The manual also lacked useful information like a full list of Bluetooth codecs. Only aptX HD is listed in the manual. On the company website, in the promotional literature, I can see the list also includes basic, vanilla aptX, aptX LL, SBC and AAC. That information should be in the manual too.

So yea, not major problems but little irritations.

So that’s basically the Triangle Borea BR03 speakers. But how do they sound? Let’s have the look, shall we?

SOUND QUALITY

I grabbed a pair of XTZ Tune 4 speakers to use as a reference here because they are remarkably cultured designs offering good tonal realism, are balanced and neutral. I wanted to see just how the more expensive Triangle speakers sounded in comparison and if they brought anything extra to the party, as it where. 

In terms of EQ and tone controls and the like? I selected – for good or ill – the factory settings on the Borea speakers to provide an out-of-the-box experience (although bass boost was turned off). I didn’t deviate from these settings during the bulk of the tests.

For sound sources? I selected my Astell&Kern Kann Alpha DAP and played The Doves’ Carousels at 24bit/96kHz via the aptX HD codec. I’m not a massive fan of any of the aptX codecs, to be honest. We can do better and with codecs like LDAC, we do. But LDAC is not available here. Despite using aptX HD, though, I was impressed by the large, open soundstage and the rock solid stereo image that pinned dead centre between the speakers. Bluetooth as a basic music carrier can be rather thin and edgy at times and that presentation could be heard here but the aptX HD codec didn’t help matters, encouraging that presentation. One that the LDAC codec, for example, would have softened and enhanced. 

In general terms, bass was big and bold and weighty with plenty of mass and bounce that drove the music along at pace although it could have been better focused using Bluetooth. 

So I moved on from Bluetooth pretty sharply and went wired, hooking up my older Astell&Kern AK120 via optical, playing Bob Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff at 24bit/96Khz. Wired play was better balanced in terms of the overall presentation. 

What I heard here was a clean, open, scrubbed soundstage and one that was wholly transparent. Vocals, for example, offered both precision and focus allowing me to hear some words within lyrics for the first time, “Oh that’s what he’s saying!” That kind of thing. Even so, I wouldn’t say the sound is strictly balanced, truly neutral. It’s slightly in the spotlight, slightly accentuated. Heightened just a tad. And that allows that spotless, cleansed soundstage where detail has no problem even reaching your ears from the back of the mix. Bass remained strong and fast paced, giving a good grounding to the music as a whole. 

I then grabbed my Rega RP3 turntable, hooked that up to the internal phono amp and played a copy of Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me from the Capitol album of the same name and that sounded good. Not amazing, not bad but generally good. The soundstage is of a healthy size, bass was reasonable, upper mids and treble offered a decent amount of fine detail but frequency extremes could be a struggle.

Sinatra’s vocals were the highlight here as they sat smack in the middle of the midband itself. They sounded rich, warming, detailed and emotive. Overall, the phono amplifier was ok and ideal for occasional vinyl use although I don’t think it’s good enough to use as a daily driver because information seemed to hit a sonic ceiling and then roll off. The upper midrange-reaching bank of strings on the track Around the World being a case in point. In short? For the price? I would have liked to have either seen a better phono amp or to have it removed entirely with an associated reduction in the price of the speaker package as a whole. 

I finally turned to my MacBook, plugging that in via USB. I played Sonny Rollins jazz outing, St Thomas at 24bit/96Khz via the software player, Audirvana. Despite this track remaining at the same resolution as the other digital sources, the greater digital bandwidth from USB mattered here. It offered a rich array of detail including a powerful yet reedy sax performance and a resonant piano plus attractive percussion that showed each tonal variation from each and every drum hit plus a lavish amount of fragile detail in and around the treble frequency. Again, the entire mix was played one degree to the left of neutral. Just slightly emphasised to give the soundstage an airy, clean effect. USB was the best sound source connection so far though. 

CONCLUSION

I do have some questions about the voicing of these Borea speakers. I’m not convinced Triangle know themselves what that should be, especially with the Bass Boost triggered every time you turn on these speakers. 

In broad terms, I dislike tone controls. I would rather run with the designers own dafault sonic intentions, as it where, rather than cock it up by messing around with tone controls. After all, surely that’s why your spending all that money? In this case, though? I would encourage you to dabble with them, they might actually improve the sound, at least for your ears. They might provide a better balanced, more neutral output for your ears. 

That aside, the Borea BR03 Connect speakers are packed with features that will provide you with a large entertainment hub of options, allowing you to plug in a host of sources that span analogue, digital and AV, giving you choices for digital audio players and Bluetooth devices. The clean, open, transparent delivery from the Borea BR03 Connect speakers gives music a fresh and well-scrubbed feel that will appeal to many music fans while the physicality of the speakers themselves help to provide both power and presence, especially around the lower frequencies. 

---

TRIANGLE BOREA BR03 CONNECT POWERED SPEAKERS 

Price: £649

Website: www.scvdistribution.co.uk

---

GOOD: clean soundstage, big bass, transparent mids, USB play, optical play

BAD: always-on bass boost, accentuated upper frequencies, Bluetooth performance, phono amplifier, manual 

RATING: 7