The ‘real-world’ in review
By Roy Gregory
Even millennials ‘know’ what a loudspeaker should look like. Their parents had them and they’ve seen them in clubs and at concerts: Big boxes with drivers on the front. Some of those drivers even have mouths like trumpets. The Colibri is, unmistakably a loudspeaker. One with its own, distinctive, part-pro/part steam-punk aesthetic, one that gives it a striking appearance. But while it might (visually at least) ransack stylistic cues from the past, for Avantgarde whose baby this is, it’s a harbinger of things to come, the once and future king.
Once, way back when, listening to music at home meant owning a hi-fi, loaded with audio specific technology, from functionally specific electronic boxes to turntables and towering loudspeakers. These days, not so much. As more and more music is consumed via streaming services rather than through physical media, audio hardware and computer systems are inevitably converging. In turn, that is changing the audio landscape. Where, in the past, the seriousness of any audio system was almost directly proportional to the number of boxes it contained, nowadays we are moving rapidly in the opposite direction. These days, even audiophiles are calling for combined capabilities and reduced box count, while an increasing number of ‘connected’ speaker systems are starting to appear, two box, active solutions that are driven directly from an internet feed. Improvements in wireless data transmission and battery life are threatening to make cables, even power cables, a thing of the past.
There’s no denying that some of the ‘smarter’ speaker systems are starting to offer astonishing performance for the money. From the Vienna Acoustics Mozart Infinity to the Focal Diva Utopia, the economic imperative is hard to ignore. After all, building everything into the speaker cabinet eliminates the single most expensive part of any electronic component. Get rid of several chassis and you are saving big-time. Switch to class D amplification and you are saving even more. Use DSP crossovers and eliminate ‘unnecessary’ inputs/circuitry and you are really onto something.
But there is a problem here and that problem is spelt “longevity.”
The heart of every streaming system is a computer, that is connected wirelessly – or physically to an Ethernet network – and that runs software to handle the incoming data. That makes music replay an extension of the computer industry and in turn, that makes an audio system’s functionality prey to changes in, or the demands of, the computer industry.
The trouble is, you can’t listen to a computer.
Even computers that produce sound need amplification and loudspeakers to do it. The better the sound produced, the more the balance of cost moves from computer system to audio system, the more you will inevitably end up investing in amplification and loudspeakers. For serious systems that investment can get considerable, but it is also vulnerable: vulnerable to changes in transmission standards; vulnerable to changes in operating systems; vulnerable even to a simple change in the hardware used for physical connection. In choosing a hi-fi system it’s got so that we have to look at the hard lessons learnt from digital development.
