Floorstanding loudspeakers — Nola Baby Grand Reference Gold 3

The Baby Grand Reference Gold 3 is a floorstanding loudspeaker made by Nola, a trade name of Accent Speaker Technology Ltd, and it borrows designs created earlier for the Grand Reference VII Gold and the Concert Grand Reference Gold 3. Each pair is built as a mirror-imaged left and right, and the suggested retail price was USD 150,000 per pair. Nola has since moved the model on to a Gold 5 revision, which keeps the same cabinet size, weight and rated range but adds newer Alnico midrange units.

Key specs that matter

Nola gives a frequency range of 20 Hz to 100 kHz and a sensitivity of 91 dB at 8 ohms. Each tower stands 170 cm high, 30.5 cm wide and 40.6 cm deep including its bases and weighs about 91 kg net. The driver line-up counts two 220 mm bass units, four midrange drivers and four proprietary true ribbon tweeters. Cabinets come in True Piano Black Gloss or True Piano Santos Rosewood, with other colours available, while the bases are always finished in piano black.

Engineering and use context

Both bass drivers use magnesium cones driven by large Alnico ring magnets, and each carries a solid copper phase plug with a soft 24K gold plating that damps the copper. The two woofers sit in separate chambers, each ported to the rear, and the lower chamber volume grew by 25 percent, from 40 to 50 litres, in this generation. The four midrange drivers also use Alnico ring magnets and the same gold-plated plugs. They work on an open baffle as a dipole across the 400 Hz to 3500 Hz band, so no box encloses them. The ribbons carry the top octaves up to the upper limit, and Nola completes their final assembly in-house with proprietary parts. Filtering is handled by three 3.5-way Unison crossovers, hand-wired with exotic passive parts and built without PC boards. A twin ball-bearing isolation base with spikes comes with each speaker to decouple it from floor-borne vibration.

Pairing

The fairly high sensitivity together with a benign nominal load lets moderate transistor or valve amplifiers drive the pair, and the open-baffle midrange fires backward too, so the towers need free space behind them rather than a spot tight against a wall. The overall weight also calls for a solid floor and at least two people for placement in a room of 20 m2 or more.

Alternatives

The Nola Metro Grand Reference Gold 3 is a smaller floorstander of the same series with twin 160 mm magnesium woofers and a single ribbon tweeter.