Piega Ace 30

Variety is the hallmark of a thriving ecosystem. High-end audio is a little niche within the wider world of consumer audio, and you’d think it wouldn’t be jam-packed with a thousand different specialized products—but that’s the beauty of the current hi-fi landscape. There’s so much new gear, and each offering fills its own role. Enter the Piega Ace 30 ($995/pair), the smallest set of bookshelf speakers to ever grace my listening room. These diminutive music-makers are amazing examples of the vast array of different use cases and needs. The Ace 30 brings the aesthetic of the Swiss manufacturer, known for its wonderful in-house-made ribbon drivers, to a new price point and size.

I can’t stress enough how small the Ace 30s are. Piega refers to them as “compact loudspeakers,” but that’s an understatement. They’re approximately 8.6″ tall, 5.5″ wide, and 6.2″ deep, and they weigh 6.6 pounds. My newborn kids weighed more than that (and were probably bigger, although not as attractive). They’re the first bookshelf speakers that could fit on my bookshelf. I was surprised when I pulled them out of the box, but extremely delighted by their fit and finish. The Ace 30s are made of aluminum with a curved cabinet, and come in silver, black, or white. My review pair was black with a small Piega badge at the bottom of the front baffle. The aluminum felt good to the touch, caught the light just right, and fit into the décor of my office with style, though I could’ve easily have slotted them somewhere more discrete if I’d wanted to hide them.

In terms of driver complement, they include an AMT-1 Air-Motion Transformer tweeter and a 4.7″ (120mm) MDS mid/bass driver. Piega claims frequency response of 50Hz to 40kHz. Of course, you’re not going to get ear-shattering bass from the Aces, which shouldn’t be a big surprise given their size. Keep in mind, these aren’t active desktop speakers, even though my first thought was that they’d fit perfectly next to my computer. But their sensitivity rating is 87dB and their impedance is listed at 4 ohms, which means they need a stout traditional power amp to sing. The only place in my house with an amp strong enough to juice these little beauties is my listening-room-slash-office area, and so they were mounted on stands and positioned in my rig. Power is the name of the game here, and a small amp likely won’t do the Ace 30s justice, though Piega’s recommendation suggests 20Wpc is enough. 

Setup couldn’t have been easier. One legitimate and frustrating limitation of big tower speakers is their weight. It’s not easy to lug a pair of heavy, expensive towers around a house, not to mention the labor it takes to get them perfectly dialed in. The Ace 30s weigh nearly nothing, so tweaking them obsessively was easy. I ended up with them positioned closer to my backwall than I normally place speakers on stands and toed-in ever so slightly. I could see these fitting easily into a wide range of rooms, purely because of their size—there are simply more options for compact speakers. Apartment dwellers or those with limited space would benefit from checking them out. If you think you can’t fit a set of speakers into your life, you haven’t seen the Ace 30s. 

I started my listening notes with the vinyl version of In Common, which was a jazz quintet made up of Walter Smith III, Matthew Stevens, Joel Ross, Harish Raghavan, and Marcus Gilmore, and led by a combination of Smith on tenor sax and Stevens on guitar. My first impressions were a mixture of surprise and delight. I was surprised at how much juice these little speakers needed to fill my room—which they probably shouldn’t have, given their specs, but did anyway—and I was delighted by the smooth midrange, especially the sax and Ross’s vibraphone. “Unconditional Love,” the penultimate track, is a moody jam with rolling drums and a lilting combination of guitar and saxophone upfront. The Ace 30s did a decent job of keeping the rhythm and overall dark emotional tenor of the song in focus, particularly Ross’ solo toward the end of the composition. The drums and bass, while clear and crisp, didn’t reach very deep and left a near-palpable sense of weightlessness. However, this was balanced by the luscious midrange and the sparkling, exciting upper-frequency range, particularly from the vibraphone. 

If you love bass, you’ll need a subwoofer with the Aces. The folks at Piega aren’t shy about this: They mention their sub right up top in the product description on their website. And really, you can’t be surprised. Bass is typically about size and the ability to move air, and the Ace 30s are more about finesse in a demure package. That’s not to say they sound thin—actually, I was pleased with how well they filled my relatively large listening room—but there was a noticeable lack of lower-octave pressure. If bass is your thing, be realistic about what you can expect from a pair of compact speakers and get a sub.

Continuing my listening, I put on the CD version of Dimension Intrusion by Fuse. “Train-Trac.1” was a deceptively sparse composition created mainly from a steady pulsing low synth and driving rhythm. I was impressed by the Ace 30’s timing and space. It would be easy for this song to come off as thin or unengaging, but I found myself nodding along to the beat as the fog-whistle-like backing drone grew louder, then quieter, than louder again. The Ace 30s sounded larger and bolder than I expected, and though I missed some of the deepest, most pounding aspects of the relentless drums, I was still tapping my foot and getting into the music. The Ace 30s needed extra juice to play at a reasonable volume, and once I got that dialed in, Fuse’s intensely propulsive music blossomed and reached its full potential. Upbeat music with complex rhythms and depth of sound worked very well through the Ace 30s.

Next up, I put on Philharmony by Haruomi Hosono. The third track, “Luminescent/Hotaru,” opens with a shimmering and repetitive synth or vibraphone pattern that shined and drifted in and out with enough snap and solidity to make the full weight of the song blossom. When the lower-end synths opened later beneath the altered human voices, the Ace 30s did a reasonable job of reproducing their heft and depth, and built out a complicated and large tune without losing a step. I was honestly impressed by them at this point, and though I felt there was a bit of midrange veiling going on, something holding the middle from really opening outward in a natural way, it didn’t distract me from the lovely complexity of Hosono’s music.

The track immediately after “Luminescent/Hotaru,” “Platonic,” was a similar crush of overlapping sounds and robotic voices with a relatively simple drum beat propelling everything forward. There’s a tendency for some electronic music to sound thin and small through speakers that aren’t properly up to the task, but I was relieved that the Ace 30s kept pace. They weren’t perfect—I noticed that veil in some of the middle-to-upper registers again—but the Aces had enough immensity and scale to hold my attention and get my head nodding along.

Finally, for my last bit of listening I turned to an old favorite, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. For one of their most famous albums, variously released as self-titled or as Moanin’, I chose the Music Matters Jazz reissue pressed on superb SRX vinyl to test out how the Ace 30s handled challenging dynamics. The opening piano, trumpet, and sax all had a nice, mellow tone, and when Blakey’s drumming drops after that bold roll before Lee Morgan takes his solo, the sound was solid, though not as powerful as I would’ve liked. The exciting thing about Blakey is his power, and speakers that can’t dig down sometimes miss this dynamism. However, the trumpet was loud and clear in the left channel, and Timmons’ piano had a natural clarity I really enjoyed.

The overall diversity of a niche hobby like high-end audio is surprising, exciting, and vital. While not for everyone, a product like the Piega Ace 30 will certainly find its audience and fans. The sound is natural and bigger than you’d expect, though there are limitations inherent in their size. Still, I greatly enjoyed them as a sign of a flourishing industry and as fascinating speakers in their own right. They’re worth checking out if space is at a premium and if that price tag isn’t a limiting factor. 

Specs & Pricing

Design: Two-way satellite loudspeaker
Driver complement: 1x 120 mm MDS; 1x AMT-1
Sensitivity: 87dB/1W/1m
Impedance: 4 ohms
Frequency Range: 50Hz–40kHz
Dimensions: 5.5″ x 8.6″ x 6.2″
Weight: 6.6 lbs.
Price: $995

PIEGA SA
Bahnhofstrasse 29
8810 Horgen
Switzerland
+41-44-725 90 42
piega.ch/en/

MoFi Distribution
mofidistribution.com