Welcome to a wireless world

Piega's Ace loudspeaker range has gone active wireless. Steve Withers swaps cables for WISA

- Steve Withers

Launched in 1986, Swiss loudspeaker brand Piega has a penchant for aluminium enclosures, ribbon tweeters, and the kind of meticulous handcrafted engineering you'd expect from a nation best known for its precision timepieces. And its Ace series ticks off all these boxes.

The range sits towards the lower end of Piega's catalogue, although it's not strictly the entry point, which is reserved for the Classic series. Passive Ace speakers debuted around a year ago (see HCC #326), but now there's a wireless upgrade adding two important features - integrated amplification and support for the WISA transmission standard.

The benefits of active speakers are fairly well known, but in case you're wondering they naturally negate the need for a separate amplifier, making installation and setup easier. Furthermore, the crossovers are optimised, minimal wiring produces less resistance or distortion, and the integrated power modules are designed to specifically match the speaker's drivers, which should lead to a better overall performance.

But what about WISA? Rather than a dodgy rock band from the 1990s, this is a transmission standard developed by the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association - a multi-member organisation co-founded by Silicon Image and Summit Wireless. Its headline tricks are low latency, rapid synchronisation, and support for up to eight 24-bit/96kHz channels simultaneously. This makes it ideal for multichannel audio, with the Ace series capable of creating a 7.1-channel system.

Poetry in Motion

The Ace Wireless range is composed of three speakers: the floorstanding Ace 50; the compact Ace 30; and the Ace Centre. All of them use extruded aluminium cabinets, upgraded midrange and bass drivers, a revised version of Piega's Air Motion Transformer (AMT) ribbon tweeter, and a sophisticated DSP system capable of handling up to 24-bit/192kHz high-res audio.