

Renaud de Vergnette at home: "I'm not an audiophile."
Renaud de Vergnette created Triangle Industries in 1980. This man is a true music lover and likes to confirm that he is no technical guy. Renaud is a pure designer in fact, a creative man whose great pleasure it is to visualize projects and then accomplish them. He also is a manager who understood early on that he must become a true industrialist and surround himself with good engineers to realize the technical aspects of the job. Always positive, always enthusiastic, Renaud de Vergnette is a gentleman renowned and respected in the audio industry. I have known him since 1994 when he asked me to review the Comete TZX (with the first affordable but proprietary Triangle Titanium tweeter). Since then, I have listened to most of his products and have noticed his growing desire to expand and grow in an intelligent way. He also is a very generous host who loves spending time at home with friends, listening to music, drinking great wines and talking 'til very late!

Laurent Thorin: From the very beginning in 1980, Triangle has used paper cones. Today technology has evolved tremendously yet you still use paper cones. Why?

Renaud de Vergnette: It's true that by 1980, paper cones had already existed for a long time but over ten long years, we had been observing the arrival of new composite materials like
bextrene, polypropylene... there was much hype at the time. I was buying my transducers from Audax and asking them for an old model they had discontinued. They reissued it especially for me. Even though they were completely counter fashion, I loved those drivers. It was so evident that in the midrange, they completely seduced me. They brought this freshness to the tonal balance, this speed - very precise and with a lot of transparency. It was a very live driver indeed. At the time I found most of what I listened to a bit dark and flat. Okay, the bass was taut, the treble was fine but the midrange which for me is the spinal column of musical playback was weak! To repeat, all of my choices are informed from this focus on the vocal band and the music I want to listen to.

LT: What are your musical tastes?

RdV: I'm very eclectic - ancient music, romantic music, jazz, rock and soul. What interests me is a musical message that makes me vibrate. Looking for that response, I have no intellectual frontier. That is important. And I think that in the reproduction, the midrange carries 99% of this particular job - to energize the listener.

LT: When did you realize that?

RdV: As a kid, my friends and I were listening to old full-range combo units and the reproduction was very faithful. Admittedly, there wasn't much bass nor treble. But the balance was so well done that the essence was there. And it was so homogeneous. Compared to today's standards, some highly regarded products still have me waiting for the music to arrive even if technically, everything is perfect. It's the same difference between a raw milk Camembert and a pasteurized Camembert.

LT: And today, you still think that's the tendency?

RdV: Not so much any more. A lot of progress has been made. Most of the systems are lively but there are different tendencies, different personalities. Still, a lot of systems intellectualize the sound where you search for a sort of absolute that doesn't truly exist. For me, the most important thing is to go to acoustic concerts to really listen to a piano, a violin and a voice and to reproduce what you feel about the music. True, we have different emotional responses. Some people want absolute neutrality. This is not my case. For me it's far more important to have the expressivity even if there are some very small colorations. The most important thing is that the emotion be here, the rhythm, that the music is as it should be: alive.

LT: So there are different schools.

RdV: Of course, one is to favor the emotional and music lover's aspects of the music. The other is to offer a more intellectual sound. What is very important is to emphasize the emotional aspect. That you can't do without the true dynamic range of the musical message.

LT: So when you build a loudspeaker, what is your most important criteria?

RdV: It's to make the best loudspeaker whatever the price, to work in an absolute way. Even if you are engineering a cheap product, you can make a true winner when the balance of qualities is excellent. When we succeed in this, I say to my collaborators that they did well - even if the product works better that a more expensive one in the range. What we learn with the new one, we will put into the others to advance them as well. The golden rule is to make the best at every level. Every day when you wake up, you should know that there remains a lot to learn, a lot to seek. That's exciting.