Piega Master Line Source 3 Loudspeakers

Piega is a Swiss loudspeaker maker that has spent four decades doing one thing better than almost anyone else: building ribbon transducers and mating them to extruded aluminum cabinets that disappear from the music. The company was founded in 1986 on Lake Zurich, and every speaker that wears the Piega badge — from the entry models to the limited-edition flagships — is still assembled by hand in Horgen, Switzerland. The ribbon-tweeter architecture that defines the brand is not borrowed technology. Piega develops and manufactures its own ribbon drivers in-house, including the coaxial ribbon module that places the midrange and treble at a single physical point and resolves the time-alignment problem that conventional two-way and three-way crossovers can only approximate. The cabinets are pulled from a single piece of extruded aircraft-grade aluminum, internally damped with Piega's Tension Improve Module to remove panel resonance before it can color the sound. The result is a presentation that listeners describe in the same vocabulary year after year: fast, clean, dimensionally precise, and free of the boxy signature that almost every traditional cabinet imposes on the music.

The Master Line Source 3 is the entry point to Piega's line-source family — entry in the sense that it sits below the MLS 2 Gen2 and the MKII LTD in cabinet volume and bass extension, not in execution. The architecture is the same: four line-source ribbon elements arrayed vertically for true line-source radiation, paired with two 180 mm UHQD bass drivers and two 180 mm UHQD passive radiators in a 165 cm extruded aluminum cabinet. The narrower 23 cm baffle gives the MLS 3 a more discreet visual footprint than its larger siblings, which matters in rooms where the speaker has to coexist with furniture and a partner who isn't building the room around the audio. Sonically, the MLS 3 delivers the same line-source signature — coherent wavefront, room-filling soundstage that doesn't degrade off-axis, ribbon transient speed at the top end — at a price that brings the technology within reach of a much wider audience than Piega's flagship tier.

This is the speaker for the listener who has demoed a line-source design and found themselves unable to go back to point-source, but who is not prepared to commit the floor space or the budget of the MLS 2. It is also, in our experience on the showroom floor, the Piega that most often closes the famous-brand customer who came in to hear something else.

Series: Master Line Source

Configuration: Three-way dipole line-source floorstander, single cabinet per side

Drivers: 4 × Line Source ribbon drivers; 2 × 180 mm UHQD bass drivers; 2 × 180 mm UHQD passive radiators

Frequency Range: 28 Hz – 50 kHz

Sensitivity: 92 dB/W/m

Impedance: 4 ohms

Recommended Amplification: 20 – 500 watts

Dimensions (H × W × D): 64.9" × 9.1" × 13" (165 × 23 × 33 cm)

Weight: 143 lb (65 kg) each

Finishes: Silver, Black Matte, White Matte, Zebrano (black anodised baffle with zebrano veneer cabinet)

Built by hand in Horgen, Switzerland.