To revisit your audio store – The Avantgarde Uno SD Loudspeaker
By Roy Gregory
We live in an era of disrupters. There was the high-end, falling into the sort of ordered and recognisable pattern that makes the industry, audiophiles and customers feel comfortable: big names were producing ever-bigger and more expensive boxes, each claiming to redefine the state-of-the art before spinning off more affordable versions with a familiar predictability. Then along came Avantgarde, gleefully tossing a ringer into proceedings, shredding the status quo and accepted notions of the price/performance equation in one joyous, colourful and disturbingly stylish explosion of musical energy. By combining current-drive amplification (the Holy Grail of amplifier design) with their well-established expertise in horn-loading (and driver design to go with it), they produced a cutting-edge high-end design that didn’t just match or exceed the competition in terms of musical performance, it crushed it on price.
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly like throwing on Lionel Messi as a substitute in a college soccer match: it didn’t have that kind of instantly cataclysmi, game changing impact, but the Trio has both rocked the established order and opened the way for other ‘alternative’ challengers, like the Clarisys speakers. The earlier emergence of products like the Stenheim and Göbel Divin speakers had already undermined the complacent superiority of the big-name brands that have dominated the last decade. The Trio’s arrival rent a gaping crack in their already crumbling façade, a structural chasm that should leave them seriously worried. With the arrival of the Uno SD, they should be petrified!
No respect for the status quo…
Any market has its benchmark or gateway products, accepted waypoints against which others are judged. For years, a pair of Wilson WATT/Puppies (in all their various guises) has been the twin gateposts at the entrance to the long drive leading to ultimate high-end performance. They defined not just a performance level but a price that was just about attainable and a size that could generally be entertained. They mark the point where serious hi-fi gets serious and they do it by dint of their price tag. Currently, any company looking to establish a complete line of high-end speakers needs to confront the price/performance benchmark represented by what has become the Sasha V. Avantgarde’s latest, active Uno does exactly that. Meeting the Wilson speaker head-on in terms of price, it confronts reputation and longevity with technology and a performance that is, on paper (and in practice) impressively potent. The Trio G3 might have gone off like a hand grenade: the impact of the Uno SD could be a whole lot more seismic…
The Uno SD is the most affordable and compact model in Avantgarde’s range of high-end loudspeakers. Like the Duo and Trio above it in the line, it exists in both passive and active forms. Like the larger models, the active option offers by far the best value. The iTron amplification delivers astonishing musical communication, clarity and dynamics, performance that would challenge the conventional alternatives at many times its (comparatively) modest asking price. That’s no surprise, given the huge theoretical advantages that the current drive approach implies, the reality of which you can read about in my Trio review https://www.theaudiobeat.com/equipment/avantgarde_trio_g3.htm. In the case of the Uno SD, the differential between passive and active models is €28,640 versus €41,340 (in basic finish and including 20% sales tax). That €12,700 increase in price doesn’t just buy you four channels of amplification and a whole bunch of tuning options: it buys you four channels of the very best amplification available at any price, at least as far as this speaker is concerned.
