Maximum Musical Pleasure

AS LONGTIME readers of Sound & Vision know, I have a passion for bass. Some might say I need to seek professional help in this regard-well, at least that's what my wife tells me! I've reviewed products for nearly 20 years and had dozens of subwoofers in and out of my theater during that time, and I am generally easy to please.

- David Vaughn

GOLDENEAR TECHNOLOGIES FORCEFIELD 40

Surprisingly, in all that time, I've never had the pleasure of reviewing anything from GoldenEar, even though the company boasts a broad line of loudspeakers and subwoofers. Well, the time has finally come.

The company's founder, Sandy Gross, co-founded and sold two successful speaker companies before the 2010 debut of GoldenEar, so his resume speaks for itself. Over the past 12-plus years, the company's speakers have received rave reviews, especially its Triton Series speakers. I've never gotten the opportunity to hear them firsthand, but from what I've read, they are some of the best-sounding speakers money can buy. Gross ultimately sold GoldenEar to The Quest Group, which also owns AudioQuest and is wholly owned by AudioQuest founder and CEO Bill Low, in early 2020.

It's been almost three years since this purchase, and even though Gross retired a few months after the sale, GoldenEar is still humming along and putting out new products.

JUST THE FACTS 

When it comes to subwoofers, GoldenEar has two levels of products. The premium offering is its SuperSub Series, plus the more budget-friendly ForceField subs. Here I'm looking at the ForceField 40, which features a front-mounted 10-inch driver coupled to a downward-firing 11 x 13-7/8-inch quadratic planar (i.e., rectangular and flat) passive radiator. I've seen a similar design in the past year from a Definitive Technology DN15 subwoofer (Gross was a founder of Definitive Technology back in 1990).