While we are on the subject of price, the €12,700 price differential between passive and active is also the upgrade price from one to the other. The review speaker cabinets were finished in a flawless piano black – a €4,700 option – although truth be told, I’ve always been happy with the mat black finish on other Avantgarde speakers. The trumpets are available in three standard, high-gloss finishes (grey, black or the review red) with the cost option to specify alternative metallic or ultra mat paint finishes.
Maximising the bang for your bucks…
The active/passive question is worth a moment’s consideration. On the one hand, the price/performance equation offered by the unique iTron amplifier package is hard if not impossible to beat. On the other, the passive option costs less initially, can quite possibly be used with an existing amplifier and can be upgraded later. In some cases, running an existing amplifier might just ameliorate the ‘shock of the new’ (you know, that sinking feeling you get when you realise just how bad your existing system actually is) although, in a situation where you’ve got speakers and an amp to trade in, I’m not sure the economics will ever support the passive route. So to me, it makes more sense as a stepping-stone than a way of avoiding buyer’s remorse. Just remember that the Unos present an 18Ω load, so some amps are going to be far more comfortable with that than others…
Looking more closely at the speakers themselves, the Uno SD shares its basic form factor with the larger Duo SD, the 160mm treble and 500mm midrange horns piercing the front-panel of the rectangular cabinet. This move away from the skeletal space frame construction of earlier models affords a number of advantages, in terms of simpler and more easily controlled construction, a larger volume for bass loading and greater surface area for dissipating the heat generated by on-board electronics. The Uno’s entire rear panel is a ribbed heat-sink and even with all that radiating area, the active version still runs noticeably warm to the touch. The bottom quarter contains the inputs and control panel for the bass driver, powered whether you run the rest of the speaker active or passive. That bass driver is itself an object lesson, not just about Avantgarde’s serious commitment to their craft, but also how different this speaker is to the average box. The 10” paper-coned unit uses a 6” voice coil, a massive motor and is connected to a 500Watt amplifier! Run it passive and it will run on a speaker level input (via binding posts) or at line-level via an XLR. As well as the various controls and the status display on the rear panel, there’s also an XLR ‘daisy chain’ output and a pair of RJ45 Ethernet sockets. The network connections allow you to hook up the bass amp(s) to control software loaded onto a PC or MAC, delivering usefully precise control of the speakers’ bottom end, the features and functionality of which I’ll get to in a moment.
