Artistry Meets Innovation

For over 40 years, Triad’s iconic speakers have been proudly designed and built in the USA at our factory in Portland, Oregon. Having development, engineering, design, fabrication, and assembly under one roof allows us to optimize every aspect of the process and focus our attention on what matters the most: spectacular sound. We innovate for the absolute best sound reproduction, curate visual designs to disappear or display proudly, and welcome nearly endless customization to ensure each piece is the perfect fit for the customer and the space it will ultimately call home.

Our priority has always been exceptional sonic quality and functional design. We believe that form should be driven by the core acoustic concept, not aesthetics. This means that our products have a clear and directed appearance that focuses on audio architecture, celebrating the natural elegance of our engineering. In other words, we never add details just to make our products look pretty, but design them to sound great. However, the result is visually beautiful.

Building to order domestically also allows us to obsess over every detail and thoroughly test everything we produce—it’s where our passion meets precision. For example, we test every speaker we build in an anechoic chamber that utilizes lasers to identify possible leaks and analyze curves in seconds. If our purpose-built, rapid-result testing equipment indicates an issue, a team member uses a hose with one end in the speaker cabinet and the other held to their ear to pinpoint the source of the leak and fix it. That requires both a high level of expertise and a passion for perfection. This demonstrates how Triad leverages cutting-edge technologies to drive efficiency and hands-on attention to detail to build the best-sounding speakers possible—something that simply cannot be done with mass-produced speakers.

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Shortly after our founding, it became abundantly clear that we needed to develop a very efficient production process to successfully pursue our passion for making exceptional-sounding, hand-built-to-order custom speakers of the absolute highest quality. There was simply no room for wasted time and materials. After studying efficient manufacturing methods modeled after the likes of Toyota and HP, we dove into the emerging field of Lean Manufacturing.

After some experimentation with our processes that led to both successes and failures, we developed our own system that flowed smoothly, minimizing waste while maximizing efficiency. We produce over eighty products, and every day begins with a list of what needs to be built and at what point each unit is in the process. The team leverages their individual technical expertise and collective understanding of our systems to determine the most efficient build order for that day while maintaining fast turnaround times and reducing waste.

While following the Lean Manufacturing process obviously made good business sense for Triad, it also made sense regarding environmental sustainability, which has always been our priority. It was a natural progression from reducing waste for economic efficiency to auditing everything we did to reduce our environmental impact simply because it’s the responsible thing to do. The work environment at Triad is surprisingly quiet and dust-free, with over-the-top ventilation and filtration systems. We have robust recycling and wood scrap management programs. We don’t use harsh solvents, and all our adhesives and finishes are water-based. It’s sometimes a technical challenge and requires a little more labor and slightly higher costs, but there’s none of the notoriously reckless pollution you see from overseas manufacturers.

When you purchase Triad speakers, you can rest assured that you’ve made the best choice in terms of sonic reproduction, engineering, build quality, aesthetics, and sustainability.

Acoustic Philosophy & Triad Voicing

In essence, a speaker is a musical instrument. Like any instrument you’re more accustomed to calling such, they generate sound waves through vibrations that pass through the air, allowing you to hear and feel the notes and tones they produce. Every musical instrument has its distinctively recognizable voice; a violin sounds like a violin, a guitar sounds like a guitar, a trumpet sounds like a trumpet, and you can pick out your favorite vocalist’s sound instantly.

Our acoustic philosophy in engineering, designing, and building our musical instruments is to reproduce the music of all those other instruments as faithfully as possible. Triad speakers are designed to have a completely natural and neutral sound, especially in the vocal range, with the higher frequencies as spacious and detailed as possible. A listener should not hear our speakers but only the music they reproduce.

To achieve this end, we developed extremely clean-sounding, low-distortion sealed box speakers with a flat (i.e., neutral) frequency response to not color the sound of the original recordings. However, expecting a single sealed box to reproduce the entire sonic range without vibrational interference between drivers and distortion is challenging, if not impossible. To overcome those limitations, we were one of the first speaker manufacturers to develop separate sealed-box subwoofers that were EQ’d neutrally to accurately reproduce the musicality of an acoustic stand-up bass and not just go “boom”.

Musicians, producers, and sound engineers put a lot of passion and work into creating a particular sound, and we want to deliver that as accurately as possible to the listener. The legendary Triad sound is characterized by its clarity, accuracy, and detail, bringing out the emotion in the music.

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At Triad, we’re passionate about precision engineering because that’s what it takes to build our exceptional-sounding speakers. Engineering ingenuity is at the core of everything we produce and drives our innovation. That foundation supports every aspect of our product development and production, from R&D to manufacturing, design, and sourcing, as we obsess over every detail.

For example, we build our solidly braced enclosures like bank vaults, with the bracing designed asymmetrically to break up any internal standing waves. We use medium-density fibreboard (MDF) for our cabinets because of its material uniformity and inert sonic behavior—it doesn’t resonate. The MDF is cut and routed on purpose-built machines that allow for intricate cuts, extremely precise tolerances, and complete customization. Rather than using industry-standard wood screws, we use brass fittings for a more solid closure that allow for any needed adjustments during testing. Every detail is in service of producing the cleanest sound and most accurate reproduction at all playback levels.

Then, we thoroughly test every speaker and component we produce to ensure that our obsessive engineering delivers real-world results. That’s every speaker and component, not just one overly-built prototype from which dubiously exceptional performance claims are made or a randomly selected sample off of an assembly line that, thankfully, we don’t have. We test everything we build to ensure it performs flawlessly before installation. And those components are compared against our published, honestly measured specifications. There’s no need to exaggerate our claims when we rigorously evaluate each component against the same benchmarks. The performance speaks for itself.

Triad’s reputation for exceptionally natural sound, characterized by its clarity, accuracy, and detail, has led the way to an exciting collaboration with Dolby® labs. As a Dolby Labs Home Atmos Speaker Development Partner, Triad has co-developed cutting-edge technology to deliver the stunningly lifelike sounds of Dolby Atmos®, DTS-X®, and Auro 3D®. In partnership with Dolby®, Triad has created a radically new line of recessed and freestanding speakers capable of moving the sounds of individual objects around the listener, even overhead, for a genuinely immersive three-dimensional audiovisual experience.

This partnership reflects our commitment to engineering ingenuity and continuous innovation to provide the best audiovisual experience that art and technology can deliver. It’s sound you have to experience to believe.

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Triad offers complete customization for our entire line of built-to-order, high-end architectural, on-wall, and in-room loudspeakers. We understand that every installation requires a unique solution to integrate exceptional sound into a sophisticated living environment seamlessly. By building-to-order, we can customize to individual needs regarding aesthetics, exacting dimensions, and even structure when needed.

Ideally, when building out a custom environment—be it a home theater or an entire home—the process should be as uncompromising as possible to bring the designer’s vision to life. With every aesthetic aspect of the project under consideration, it would be a pity to include speakers that didn’t fully integrate visually into the installation to disappear or intentionally stand out. Triad offers dozens of stock finishes, and the ability to match paint or wood finishes perfectly. Veneer finishes are book-matched, with even the backs and bottoms of our free-standing speakers finished with the same attention to detail. For in-wall and in-ceiling installations, paint matching and purpose-built enclosures allow speakers to be heard yet not seen.

Occasionally, installation projects have structural needs that require specific dimensions or cabinet shapes. Because we build-to-order, Triad speaker cabinets can even be modified to fit particular custom applications (e.g., working around a pipe in-wall). One-off designs can be executed as well. What is never altered is the exceptional Triad sound, as we’ll ensure that even the most complicated customizations we build deliver uncompromising sonic reproduction no matter the structural configuration.

With Triad, stating that the possibilities are endless is not hyperbole.