Tower Speaker Reviews

The construction is impressive: an inner cabinet of medium-density fiberboard (MDF) is damped with plates of bitumen (an asphalt-like material) and covered in pressure-adhered aluminum side panels. Each driver is enclosed in its own chamber. High-quality resistors and inductors are used in the crossover, and all internal wiring is Piega's own Opus cable. The speaker terminals are of nonmagnetic chromed brass. Switches on the back plate give you ±2dB high-frequency adjustability and extended (to 40Hz) or rolled-off LF response. The P5 LTD is available with grilles of curved, opaque black or transparent, sexy-looking (to techno-geeks) meshed aluminum.

The wedge-shaped P4 C Mk.II center speaker is hefty (26 pounds) and compact in a bitumen-damped, extruded-aluminum enclosure. It uses the P5 LTD's ribbon tweeter flanked by two 5-inch Peerless midbass drivers: one limited to 150Hz, the other extending to 3.5kHz. An integrated bracket allows for mounting on a monitor or wall. The P4 C Mk.II can also be used as a surround speaker or as a front or rear satellite, and it matches the P5 LTD's 89dB efficiency with an impedance of 4?.

Finally, the P Sub 1 is an unusually compact (18x14x17 inches) bass-reflex subwoofer with a built-in, American-made 500W RMS amplifier. It weighs 68 pounds and uses a 10-inch Peerless woofer and a 10-inch passive radiator. The MDF cabinet is clad in polished aluminum. It has both LFE and speaker-level inputs. Despite the P Sub 1's small size, its response is rated down to 19Hz.

Setup and Use
I placed the six Piegas where I usually place speakers in my home theater: with the front L/R speakers flanking my monitor and the rear towers facing the listening position. Because the P5 LTD's mid/tweeter assembly is located midway up the tower, it barely cleared the height of my L-shaped sectional couch. Keep that in mind if you're considering using a pair of P5 LTDs for the rear channels.

The mid/tweeter array is centrally placed to limit the design's vertical HF dispersion. Limiting vertical dispersion can improve imaging because there will be less floor and ceiling bounce, thus a greater ratio of direct to reflected sound. That's a good thing, and it's why limiting vertical dispersion is part of the THX speaker standard. Wide horizontal dispersion is preferable because it avoids the "sweet spot" syndrome, in which being even slightly off-axis rolls off the highs. I ran the P5 LTDs with their response-adjustment switches set to Flat on top and Extended on the bottom.

Once everything was set up and ready to go, it was time for my wife to chime in. Despite Piega's best attempt at a high Wife Acceptance Factor, mine hated the P5's high-tech appearance. The Piega look is definitely best suited to European and contemporary design tastes. I love how they look; if you've got a big silver RPTV, few speakers will look better—especially if you get the transparent silver-mesh grilles.

Smooth-Sailing Sound
The audio world abounds in examples of companies able to build great drivers but incapable of designing coherent-sounding speakers. But from the minute I first fired up the Piega system till the Sanibel folks came to take it away, I reveled in these speakers' unerring musical integrity and apparent neutrality. Somehow, with the P5 LTD, Piega has figured out how to seamlessly mate the tweeter/midrange ribbons with the two 6.5-inch Vifa woofers. The top and bottom never separated out into "treble" and "bass."

This expensive system had an airy, easy, sweet, transparent, highly resolved top end that never sounded mechanical or harsh—unless the recording or soundtrack was. The ribbon midrange driver followed suit, never sounding thin, mechanical, or peaky. The tough transition from the midrange to the midbass was beautifully handled, at least subjectively, with just enough weight and air to make the handoff transparent. When I ran them full-range in 2-channel mode, the P5 LTDs produced an enormous, coherent, wide sonic picture that had no trace of the actual driver locations. I'll bet the measurements tell the same story.

The bottom-end response was impressively extended and articulate, clearly demonstrating effective cabinet damping; most pop, rock, and jazz recordings didn't miss anything. Most important in a home-theater environment, the stability of lateral imaging and frequency response was outstanding, with no apparent beaming ("spotlighting" of high frequencies).

The P4 C Mk.II center-channel speaker seemed too small to compete with the big towers, and the lack of a dedicated midrange driver—plus having one of the 5-inch Peerless cones going all the way up to 3.5kHz—had me concerned about the P4 C's tonal transparency and its ability to "disappear"—to create the illusion that dialogue is coming from the actors' mouths instead of from a box atop the monitor. Typical midrange/tweeter transitions occur between 2.2kHz and 2.7kHz. If you run the larger mid-woofer cone up too high, it can beam at higher frequencies. Piega opted to match the P5 LTD's 3.5kHz crossover to ensure that the center speaker would blend seamlessly with the L/R speakers, and because they feel that crossing over at a lower frequency can harm musical coherence in the all-important midrange.

They succeeded—the P4 C Mk.II managed to blend seamlessly with the big towers, disappearing effectively and easily creating the illusion that dialogue was being spoken by the actors, not the box. What's more, the P4 C turned out to be one of the most tonally neutral, uncolored, unboxy center-channel speakers I've reviewed. The clarity and effortlessness of sibilants and transients in general gave it a clean, clear, unforced character that never called attention to the speaker. It was free of boxy colorations, yet its claimed response is down to 50Hz, ±2dB.

The diminutive P Sub 1 subwoofer was designed specifically for the smaller rooms typically found in Europe. But its bass extension left little to be desired, and the P Sub 1's room-filling low-frequency power was remarkable. Usually, I ran the P5 LTDs full-range, so the sub had little to do above 30Hz or so, which meant it was used mostly for movies' LFE channels. However, when I tried the system in THX mode, which means crossing over to the subwoofer at 80Hz, the P Sub 1 was equally satisfactory. I've heard subwoofers that were stealthier, weightier, and texturally more subtle and nuanced, but none this small that could produce as much effortless, uncompressed, undistorted, impressively deep bass.