Triangle Capella Review
Triangle takes its speaker technology and adds a wireless twist – is the Capella the all-rounder your life needs?
Verdict
The Capella has some quirks which you need to take into account before buying it but the core of what it does and how it does it are extremely convincing. This is a very capable active speaker system at a decent price.
Pros
- Big, confident and enjoyable sound
- Excellent connectivity
- Well-made and attractive
Cons
- No dedicated streaming app
- Some amp noise at idle
- Likely to need the dedicated stands
Key Features
- PowerActive speaker system with 2×50 watts per cabinet
- ConnectivityMedia hub with streaming, analogue and digital inputs
- Wireless connectivityWiSA streaming standard between hub and speakers
Introduction
The last few years have been a very interesting time to be a speaker manufacturer.
Hi-Fi systems are changing shape and the conventional trio of source, amp and speakers is now often simply amp and speakers (as the amp is perfectly capable of being the source too) but, for a bold speaker manufacturer, there is the option do everything yourself and be the only bit of hardware a customer actually buys. There have seen a number of speaker systems that offer inputs and streaming direct to the speaker itself to realise this.
Triangle has a distinguished reputation for making box speakers and they have shown an aptitude for exploiting these recent changes by making powered versions of some of the Borea range of speakers. The Capella which is intended to sit above those is a more ambitious and sophisticated device. The means by which it works is a little different and it offers features and functionality that are new to Triangle.
If these bells and whistles work as they should, the Capella could be a formidable new arrival but actually making sure everything works as intended is rather more involved. Can the Capella deliver on the on paper promise?
Availability
The Capella is available in the UK for £2,499, less stands and microphone which I’ll cover in due course. In the US, this price is $2,999 in the same condition while in Australia, the same system is $5,500 AUD. This is not money you lose down the back of the sofa but the premise of the Triangle is that once you have bought it, you need very little else in the way of supporting equipment so you aren’t budgeting for a pair of speakers so much as a complete system.
As noted, this price does not include the optional stands. These are called the S05 and, at £279 in the UK are not that pricy compared to some dedicated offerings. This is good because, for reasons of design it is likely you will want to budget for them when shopping for the Triangle so this should really be taken into account with decision making.
Design
- Conventional Triangle aesthetics in four finishes
- Dedicated media box
- Design is room friendly… but needs some thought.
Triangle is best known for their conventional box speakers but while they might be ‘conventional’ in terms of the technology they use, the design and aesthetic has always been distinctive and eye catching.
So it is the case with the Capella. Each speaker is a two way standmount that uses drivers that have seen use in passive members of the family. The result is a very well-proportioned speaker indeed and something that should sit in most rooms rather nicely.
This is helped by there being four finishes to choose from, all available for the same price. Two of these are normal enough; where would we be in 2024 without gloss white and black? The two other finishes are much more striking though. The Astral Blue (pictured) and Nebular Brown, have a mottled ‘not quite wood, not quite animal print’ effect (which is present but less visible on the black too) which sets the colours off dramatically and looks great in light. For some people it will be a bit much but Triangle deserves praise for trying something a bit different and it’s helped by the build quality and standard of finish being excellent.
Unlike a few other examples of a powered wireless speaker, Triangle has taken the decision to use a separate media box to collate inputs being sent to the Capella. This little box isn’t the prettiest thing going but it has some advantages. The first is that, under test, the Capella sample has been stable 100% of the time. Triangle pairs the speakers to their specific media box at the factory and it means that the Capella comes out of the box and just works in a way that has eluded some rivals.
The other benefit is practical. The box can be placed in such a way to make routing inputs to it simple rather than having to ensure they can make it all the way to one of the speakers which is the case for non-media box designs. A decent remote handset is also supplied to help with control.
Some parts of the Triangle are a little quirkier though. The speaker cabinets are lower ported. This has the benefit of making the speaker less fussy about placement but to give the port the required clearance, Triangle has fitted a lower frame to the underside.
This gives the Capella a very large footprint that will be larger than some dedicated stands can handle (it’s why, the samples in the pics are on a very large and comparatively low stand that normally has a Mission 700 on it). As noted earlier, the optional S05 stand would get around this so it might be worth budgeting for. If you are putting the Capella on a sturdy shelf or sideboard though, it isn’t an issue. Don’t forget you’ll need three free mains sockets to make the Capella work although Triangle does at least supply respectably long ones for the speakers.
Features
- Internal Class D amplifiers
- WiSA wireless standard
- Analogue and digital inputs and streaming… but no dedicated interface
- Optional calibration system
The Capella is an active speaker system as opposed to a powered design which Triangle’s more affordable models conform to. What’s the difference? In an active speaker like the Capella, the signal is received and sent to the crossover. It is divided by frequency to go to the relevant driver and only then is it amplified. This means that each cabinet has a 50W class D driver for both the tweeter and the mid bass in it which is where the 100 watt figure you’ll see in the online blurb comes from.
Each cabinet uses the same 160mm cellulose driver as the Borea models but partners it with a 25mm magnesium tweeter with horn loading; a company speciality. This improves the sensitivity and the ability of the tweeter to evenly disperse high frequency energy.
Each speaker communicates with the media hub via the WiSA standard; a longstanding and well-engineered option that has had a quiet few years but seems to be coming back into popularity. This allows for sample rates of up to 24-bit/96kHz to be sent to the speakers without compression and offers low latency for video use as well.
Interestingly, both speakers also have an RCA input on them, not as a backup connection to the hub but as a means of connecting to a more conventional preamp if you wish.
I suspect most people won’t be rushing to do this as the supplied hub has plenty of connection options. Chromecast and Bluetooth are supported by HDMI ARC, one USB B, one coax, three optical and an analogue RCA and one 3.5mm connection which should be enough for most needs. This is supported by UPnP streaming as well but, at the moment at least, the Triangle has no app and interface of its own which puts you at the mercy of third party apps which won’t feel as slick as some rivals.
If you use the Roon software platform though (which I do), the hub is ready to go and it works extremely well but this is a pricey option if the Triangle is going to be your only device. Something else that is a possible limitation is that there is no wired subwoofer out on the media hub.
There is a dedicated Capella app though and what it does is rather interesting as it gives the option to calibrate the Capella to work better in your room. An optional microphone (£115) can be used to measure the performance and apply corrections in the Capella app to produce a flatter and more even frequency response in your room. Compared to more automated systems like Dirac it’s more involved to use but it offers huge scope to fine tune how the Capella works and ensure the performance is exactly how you want it to be rather than something close to it.
Sound Quality
- Big and confident sound
- Surprising bass extension
- Some small, unwanted noise though
With the painless setup completed, the Capella does a lot to impress. There was a time where the Triangle horn loaded tweeter could be a slightly mixed blessing. The huge amount of detail and energy it delivered could be too much of a good thing when you gave it something that was less than brilliantly mastered.
The Capella keeps the energy and top end sparkle of the older models but, even when you ask it to play Never Going Under by Circa Waves with no tweaks to the EQ, the Capella stays fundamentally civilised. In the time the samples have been here, they’ve seen use with everything from well mastered high res through Spotify and Internet radio and been entirely civilised throughout.
They’ve been impressively loud when required too. A notional advantage of active speakers is that they are more efficient and generally extract a wider frequency response from the same sized cabinet than a passive equivalent. While this isn’t always the case in reality, the Capella manages to go louder and hit harder than you might expect a cabinet of this size to manage. The bass extension in particular is superb for a speaker this size.
What’s more, until you are pushing them to the sort of levels where the neighbours get the police involved, it’s impressively civilised as well. No less importantly, the sound they create has an order and three dimensionality that means that even complex orchestral work like the Cinematic Orchestra’s Manhatta is a believable reproduction of an orchestra when you listen to it.
When you use the Capella for TV and film work, the effect is no less convincing. Having enjoyed watching Twisters at the cinema, I rewatched the original Twister on Amazon and was impressed both at the clout and immersion that the Capella offers. I have never heard an actual real life tornado and I don’t believe they actually sound like an angry dinosaur but the Triangle did an excellent job of conveying the sound engineer’s intent.
More traditional TV (in this case, hours of Olympics content) was also handled brilliantly. The Triangle has a particular knack for keeping everything intelligible and enjoyable even at low levels and the HDMI implantation has been pretty good in use.
Pretty good but not perfect though. The Capella’s day to day operation is stable and confidence inspiring but it’s not to say that there aren’t quirks. When the speakers wake up from standby, there can be a fairly considerable delay before they begin playing and some amp noise is audible through the speakers in this time. I have also found that adjusting the volume in Roon or via the TV remote in HDMI ARC can leave the Capella’s remote thinking that the levels are different to what they actually are. It’s not been a huge issue for me but both things make the user experience not quite as slick as it could be.
Where I’m more enthused is just how enjoyable the Capella is as a music delivery system. When I connect a Rega Planar 10 turntable and a Cyrus Classic Phono stage to the analogue input and listened to Emily King’s Scenery (one of my favourite albums of the last decade), I didn’t sit there thinking about how the Triangle was converting the signal back to digital and streaming it wirelessly to the speakers. I sat there thinking it sounded great and that’s a very decent accomplishment.
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Should you buy it?
Stable Sonics
The Triangle not only sounds very good but delivers these sonics with a reassuring stability that speaks to the care and attention that has gone into the design. It’s not cheap but it compares very favourably to rivals and works extremely well while it does it.
Finishing Touches
A dedicated streaming app and some detail tweaks to the day to day operation would make the Capella even better. At the moment it’s a fine product but some rough edges remain
Final Thoughts
Something that the Triangle does very well is deliver the ideal of separates style audio while only being a pair of speakers and a dinky media box. It delivers a level of performance that normally needs rather more faff and hassle to achieve and looks excellent while it does it.
How we test
We test every wireless speaker we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Tested with real world use
Tested for more than a week
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FAQs
The Capella can play audio up to 24-bit/192kHz through its WiSA hub.
Full specs
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
