Jones & Cerreta Troubadour
A field-coil loudspeaker from Andrew Jones
The Troubadour is the first loudspeaker from Jones & Cerreta, a new company founded by legendary speaker designer Andrew Jones with Jamie and Bill Cerreta. It combines a field-coil concentric midrange/tweeter, dual 12-inch woofers and high sensitivity in a three-way design created with three priorities: high efficiency, natural voicing and deep bass.
Those priorities, and the unusual engineering used to pursue them, make Troubadour particularly interesting to us at Backbeat.
Troubadour is coming to Backbeat Audio in Portland.
Designed around a different set of priorities
Andrew Jones has spent much of his career exploring concentric loudspeaker designs, from KEF and TAD through ELAC and MoFi Electronics. Troubadour takes that work in a new direction.
Jones & Cerreta began with conversations about what its founders wanted from a loudspeaker: high efficiency, good voicing and deep bass. Rather than fitting those goals into a conventional package, Troubadour accepts their consequences. It’s large. Its drivers are large. And its 95dB sensitivity makes it compatible with low power tube amps that many contemporary reference loudspeakers effectively ignore.
That combination resonates at Backbeat. Field-coil loudspeakers have fascinated us for decades, as have high-efficiency designs and alternative approaches to reproducing music. Not simply because they’re different, but because some unconventional designs can be remarkably effective at preserving the human qualities in a musical performance.
Troubadour brings several of those interests together in one speaker.
A field-coil concentric.
At the center of Troubadour is a 10-inch paper-cone midrange with a 1.25-inch fabric-dome tweeter located at its acoustic center. Both use field-coil motors.
Most dynamic loudspeakers use permanent magnets. A field-coil driver instead uses an electrically energized coil to create its magnetic field, requiring an external power supply. It’s an old idea that largely disappeared when permanent magnets became stronger, smaller and more practical.
Andrew Jones sees reasons to revisit it.
The regulated magnetic field provides greater control over the driver’s behavior, with benefits for transient response and dynamics.
In Troubadour, Jones has combined field-coil technology with the concentric driver architecture he has developed throughout his career. The midrange and tweeter share an acoustic center, while their field-coil motors are themselves arranged concentrically.
As far as Jones is aware, this combination hasn’t been done before.
High efficiency, with bass
High sensitivity is particularly appealing to listeners who use tube amplification, but achieving it alongside meaningful bass extension is difficult.
Two 12-inch paper-cone woofers handle the low frequencies, one facing forward and the other rearward in a force-cancelling arrangement. Unlike the concentric midrange and tweeter, the woofers use conventional neodymium motors.
The preliminary specifications tell the larger story: 95dB sensitivity and bass extension to 34Hz.
The result is a loudspeaker designed to work with a much wider range of amplification, including the kinds of tube amplifiers we love at Backbeat.
Debuted at AXPONA 2026
Troubadour made its public debut at AXPONA 2026 and quickly became one of the show’s more talked-about new loudspeakers, with listeners and reviewers commenting on its dynamics, tonal character and sense of scale. The demonstration was particularly interesting from a Backbeat perspective: Troubadour was paired with Thorens, EMT and Lab 12 electronics—an analog and tube-based system very much in our wheelhouse.
Jones & Cerreta Troubadour Specifications
Design: Three-way floorstanding loudspeaker
Midrange: 10-inch paper-cone field coil
Tweeter: 1.25-inch fabric-dome field coil
Bass: Dual 12-inch paper-cone woofers
Sensitivity: 95dB
Nominal impedance: 5 ohms
Frequency response: 34Hz–30kHz
Crossover frequencies: 120Hz / 1kHz
Field-coil power: External power supply for each speaker
U.S. price: $33,900/pair
Troubadour is preparing for production. Specifications are preliminary and may change.
Want to hear Troubadour?
Troubadour is coming to the Backbeat listening studio in Portland. Sign up and we’ll let you know when it arrives and how you can hear it.