The acoustic principles that govern loudspeaker design are – unlike digital technology – mature and well-understood. You can’t get a musical quart out of an acoustic pint pot – no matter how hard you try. Any loudspeaker system that is going to approach the sort of levels you hear in a club or the dynamic range you hear in a live concert, is going to require size and considerable engineering – and that’s going to make it expensive.
Now combine that realisation with the drive for simpler, more integrated systems and the rapid turnover in digital technology and you begin to see the problem. Who wants to invest heavily in acoustic technology if its longevity is going to be undermined by the associated digital hard- and software? Who wants to buy a large and expensive pair of speakers only to have them rendered redundant after a couple of years? Yet, with one simple inversion, it was a conundrum that Avantgarde felt perfectly placed to solve.
The existing range of highly-regarded (and highly-priced) high-end speakers from Avantgarde all share certain key characteristics:
They employ horn loaded mid and treble drivers (for high sensitivity and dynamic range).
They team those with actively equalised bass units (to deliver bandwidth and matching levels from compact boxes).
They rely extensively on moulding technology (to facilitate cost-effective quantity production).
If for a moment, you accept that there is a dichotomy between the short lifespan of digital electronics and the long working life of acoustic engineering (loudspeakers), then isn’t there an argument for separating the two and investing accordingly? Why not pair an expensive set of high-sensitivity, wide-bandwidth loudspeakers (that you hang on to) with a set of ‘disposable’ digital electronics that you simply replace as and when they’re no-longer compatible with advancing standards? I can see the sustainability police getting bent out of shape already – but let’s not forget that we live in a brave new world where it’s not only the music that arrives over the internet. Cruise the web and you’ll find any number of astonishingly versatile streaming/control units combined with built in Class D amplifiers for €200 and up! As I write this, I’m looking at the WiiM Amp, arguably one of the more ambitious online offerings, with ethernet, USB and HDMI streaming input capability, an S/PDIF input (on TosLink, but you can’t have everything), an analogue input on RCAs, a sub-woofer output and 80W/Ch to drive loudspeakers via substantial binding posts. The chassis is 8” (200mm) square and 2.5” (65mm) tall. It is wireless cable, remote controllable and has its own dedicated streaming/control App – all for the princely sum of €380, delivered to your door. Yep – that’s an entire electronics package in a box not much bigger than a Mac Mini and at half the price of an even semi-serious ‘phone.
Suddenly the idea of churning electronics doesn’t seem quite so dumb.
Having said that, with a pair of Avantgarde Uno SD speakers tipping the balance at €30,000 (and taking up a fair bit of space to boot) it’s not really a credible partnership. What Avantgarde needed to do, in order to make the maths work, was to leverage their existing expertise into a different shape at a lower price. But before doing that, they first had to re-think traditional notions of just what a loudspeaker is and, just what it should do – and that means starting with the basics.
The tyranny of the orthodox…
Traditional speaker design, the sort that graces everything from mini systems to audiophile flagships costing hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars, shekels or any other currency you care to name, exists in the strait-jacket of two iron rules: bandwidth and flat frequency response. The dogma states that human hearing extends from 20Hz to 20kHz and you need to reproduce as much of that range as possible, as evenly as you can. Generating high-frequencies up to and beyond 20kHz is relatively easy and doesn’t cost a lot. Generating frequencies down to 20Hz is both difficult and costly. Producing low frequencies at a usable level means employing a large cabinet. Reduce the cabinet volume and you start to reduce bandwidth or level, so the designer ends up trading sensitivity for extension. In general, (and this description is nothing if not generalised) the smaller the speaker, the less bottom end it generates. There will be exceptions to each and every point here, but that IS the point: they’re the exceptions and I’m talking about the rule. If you take those physical constraints and apply them to conventional speaker design, you can easily see how we’ve ended up where we are…
