The Avantgarde Mezzo G3

Not all trumpets are equally shiny! Avantgarde offers a number of interior design(er) friendly, matt finishes for their horns.

Whether you play Art Blakey (the Moanin’ re-issue) or Lisa Batiashvili’s stunning Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (UCCG-41048), something small and intimate like Anastasia Kobekina’s Ellipses (Mirare MIR604) or something completely over the top, like Cheap Trick’s Live At The Budokan (Epic/Sony 25.3P-5) you’ll enjoy that same, performance first, musical integrity. From the insistent rhythmic and temporal precision of ‘Along Came Betty’ to the hitch-kick pace changes of Nanci Griffith’s ‘Listen To The Radio’ (Storms, MCA/Alto AA004), the music is allowed to pick its own path, driving the system rather than the other way around. The only word that fully captures the musical fluency of the Mezzo (and the Trio G3) is “literate”. These speakers understand – and allow you to understand – the music as few others do. It’s a function of the current drive amplification with its unimpeded dynamic response and ability to track the demands of the input signal. It’s a function of the system’s lucid musical clarity and unforced sense of organisation. But it’s also a function of the continuity between the horn-loaded upper registers and low-frequencies, the ability to both discriminate and project shifts in level, a broad dynamic range, and instrumental texture right across the musical range.

This seamless projection of musical energy is what places the Mezzo adjacent to the Trio G3 and separates it from the Duo GT – not exactly Siamese twins but definitely brothers in arms. In that familial context, the Duo GT is more of a first cousin, with plenty of shared DNA, but plenty that’s not.

“Moving on up…”

How close does the Mezzo get to delivering Trio G3 performance? It is close to matching the immediacy and communicative qualities of the bigger system, abilities that might have you questioning the value of the flagship – until you listen to the two side by side. That’s when you realise that the added bandwidth and headroom of the Trio delivers an unmatched sense of scale, dimensionality and sheer physical presence. That fully developed bottom-end supports even more intimate and transparent upper-registers, more fully developed textures and harmonic development. But that’s okay, ‘cos the Trios, even with a single pair of Dual Spacehorns weigh in at two-and-a-half times the price of the Mezzo. You’d like to think you are getting something for the extra money – and you are. But the neat trick here is that, in terms of musical insight and presentation, the Mezzo sits so far ahead of its immediate price peers that it’s easy to imagine that you can’t do better – or certainly that you don’t need to.

Does that make the Mezzo the Trio-lite? That would be to mischaracterise its musical achievements. Rather, it’s as much of the Trio’s performance and absolute musical authority as you can shoehorn into a speaker of this size. Given that few of us can afford or accommodate the Trios, that’s a significant consideration. The Mezzo might not be small, but it is a lot smaller than the Trio, it demands less space and ultimately, you can get away with less of a system if you must. It’s built on the same musical structure, with the same lucid, clarity of pattern and vocal/instrumental juxtaposition. It offers much of he same insight into the what and the why of a performance, if not quite matching the sense of where. What that gives it is the same musical literacy as the flagship, the ability to shift language and vocabulary with different material, to fasten to the sense and intent in the music and the performance rather than getting distracted by the more mundane facts and cosmetics. Detail and resolution? You’ve got them in spades – especially when it comes to micro-dynamic textures and harmonics – but this is detail bound to a meaningful musical whole, detail that makes sense and adds to the event, as opposed to detail that simply is.