Piega Premium Wireless 701

An elegant exterior can hide a multitude of sins, but pleasingly this floorstander sounds every bit as good as it looks

Piega’s Premium Wireless 701 is the kind of speaker glossy magazine lifestyle supplements exist for. A willowy tower of gleaming aluminium, it’s so good looking it puts pressure on its surroundings to come up to par. A fully active design, there’s no need for untidy amps and speaker cables and the mains leads trailing from the back of each speaker are slim enough to be tucked out of sight. The same is true of the compact Piega Connect box, providing the wireless connection between source and speaker.

Piega is Italian for ‘fold’, and it was a new type of folded ribbon tweeter – the so-called Linear Drive Ribbon – that gave the fledgling Swiss operation a significant slice of its USP and, over time, evolved into what is claimed to be “the world’s first coaxial ribbon system”. The practical upshot is that Piega’s large ribbon panel reaches down far lower than conventional ribbon tweeters, allowing much easier integration with the partnering dynamic drivers, which can be freed to do what they do best (bass and lower midrange).

The latest iteration of the LDR ribbon tweeter features a tweaked magnet system and new foil membrane to provide a wider frequency response (up to 35kHz is claimed) as well as improved efficiency. It’s joined by two long-throw 140mm MDS drivers handling the lower-mid and bass frequencies which, with the help of a front-firing reflex port, reach down to a claimed 34Hz.