But the album that really illuminates just how secure a musical grasp these speakers have, how stable a sense of pace and pitch, time and level, is Coltrane’s A Love Supreme(Impulse AS-77). The convoluted, elongated lines and sheets of notes can wander and meander on many systems, losing their sense of purpose, shape and direction. But not here. Rarely has the intensity of Coltrane’s performance and commitment been so apparent. Rarely has this music been so captivating, the four parts following so naturally that playing only one side is never even considered. I wanted to know how the Avantgardes would handle what is (at least for me) so often a difficult album. I wanted to dip in and test the waters, but I ended up sinking in for the duration. That’s what these speakers can do. I’ve spent a long time describing the ‘how’, trying to communicate the difference between these and so many other speakers, including previous Avantgarde models, but as always, it’s the end result – the ‘what’ – that really matters.
Ask almost anybody buying a €100K+ loudspeaker why they’d spend the money and the answer will invariably revolve around the love of music. It’s a well-worn cliché. But if we’re honest we buy expensive audio equipment for a great many different reasons: a fascination with the equipment itself; a fascination with the differences we can hear (which generally don’t have a lot to do with music); self-gratification; insipient consumerism… The list of potential motivations is almost endless and much of it has precious little to do with wider (or widening) musical interests. But at the end of the day, there’s only really one way that a music system can quiet the doubters, one justification for its expense – and that’s the performance. In the same way that the Launch Control function in a McLaren sports car will leave you quite literally breathless, an audio system that costs as much as a super-car should deliver similar impact in just as short a time. Which is one box that the Avantgarde speakers certainly tick – emphatically. I might refer to this system by the slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker of G3-Lite, but let’s be clear about this: it sounds just as remarkable as it looks. This is one system that you’ll never find yourself apologising or making excuses for, that will never leave you (or anybody else) wondering. Not just because it goes LOUD (it does) or DEEP (it does that too), but because it clearly, unequivocally and explicitly does MUSIC. Music like most of us have never heard at home.
Whether you want a system to impress your audiophile friends, your neighbours, you really do want a system that plays music, or all three, the Trio G3 ticks all the boxes. The ‘ton-and-a-half’ price point is rapidly becoming the most over-populated and hotly contested sector of the loudspeaker market, with key models from old-stagers like Wilson, Vandersteen and Rockport, would-be usurpers like Magico and relative newbies like Stenheim and Göbel. But the Trio G3-Lite package undercuts them all for price, beats all but the Vandersteens on bandwidth and buries them all in terms of dynamic range. Anyway you cut it, it’s a whole lot of performance and a whole lot of music for your money: all wrapped up in a package to make an interior designer’s heart sing.
And it’s upgradable too!
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that you can take the Trio G3 active for €29K (less the value of whatever amplifier you are using to drive the passive speaker). So, not only does the Trio trump the competition on musical grounds, but like a ladder dropping from the clouds, it promises more than a hint of far greater things. Leaving aside the issues of size and accommodation (because even the Trio G3-Lite ain’t exactly compact) and looked at purely from a performance perspective, the fact is that in terms of delivering the musical message the Trio G3 can meet and beat pretty much anything you want to put up against it, anywhere close to its price. Even more remarkable, that communicative and musical superiority is maintained, despite the performance gap from the passive Trio G3 to the fully active system, underlining just how much performance headroom the active Trio set-up has in hand. That opportunity to step up from passive to active operation, without cost penalty makes for an additional and compelling attraction.
