High Efficiency Speaker Asylum: REVIEW: Avantgarde Duo Speakers by Jeff Day Need speakers that can rock with just one watt? You found da place.

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My first listening experience with Avantgarde loudspeakers was at the San Francisco Stereophile show with my wife, Deanne, and her Dad, Rich (an absolutely terrific guy and former audiophile who has pretty much ignored the audio industry for a good number of years now, choosing instead to enjoy the music on his mostly vintage system). At the show, amplification was by Audio Note with master tapes dubs playing on a half-inch, two-track Ampex as a source. Great music-playing demonstration, as you would expect.

Last year about this time, Deanne surprised me with a “just for fun” gift—she ordered a pair of the Avantgarde Duo 2.0 loudspeakers for us. Wowza! What a surprise! After a month or so of anxious waiting a shipping truck pulled up to our residence with the Duos. The Duos were packed better than any pair of speakers I have ever purchased; with heavy-duty cartons as big as refrigerators (bigger actually), and nary a scratch on the shipping cartons after the long trip from Germany. Avantgarde and the US importer, Jim Smith, are to be congratulated on the fine packing and shipping arrangements they provide their customers that are not near an Avantgarde dealer.

After unboxing the speakers and setting them up, the shake down process began. After trying a number of combinations of associated equipment we settled on the following: a Meridian 508 CD player, Joule-Electra pre-amplifier with some custom modifications by Jud Barber (silver wired), and custom-made amplifiers by Gordon Rankin (all silver, parallel feed, WE437A input, 45 output), and Nirvana cables to tie everything together—with a special Nirvana wiring harness for the Duos designed by Gordon Rankin that works wonders. By the way, I can’t recommend Gordon Rankin and his work highly enough; he is an absolutely terrific guy and makes marvelous products—a real class act! Ditto for Jud Barber.

We were living in a temporary residence at the time we took delivery of the Duos, with a small 11’ x 15’ listening room (spare bedroom) that just couldn’t do justice to the big speakers. We have since moved into a new house with a fairly live listening room with hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings that measures 21 by 17 feet (and opens into another large space) where the Duos really thrive. The Duos are positioned about 2 feet out from the side walls, and about 6 feet out from the 17 foot long back wall, and are about 16 feet on the diagonal from the listening position. The speakers are toed in so that the tweeters’ axes cross about 1 foot behind the listener’s head. The mid-range and tweeter modules are positioned in their highest positions, and the tweeter axis is at ear level at the listening position. The speakers have the supplied spikes installed, and are resting on pennies at the moment to protect the hardwood floors. The sub-modules’ crossover frequency is set to the 2 o’clock position, the volume at the 11 o’clock position, and the subsonic filters at 20Hz. With these settings the Duos are flat, plus or minus 3.5 dB, from 20Hz to 12.5KHz. At 20Hz the subs are up 2.5 dB from flat, and the tweeters start rolling off fairly steeply at 16KHz (down 6 dB) and are down 11 dB at 20KHz, as measured by a Radio Shack sound level meter (C weighting, slow response, with correction curve applied) against the Stereophile Test CD III.

The Duos portray music with a relaxed clarity that places believably life-sized and tangible aural images on a vast soundstage that breathes with the soundspace’s presence in an utterly intoxicating fashion. Dean Peer’s four-stringed electric bass on “Lord’s Tundra” (from Ucross, Redstone RR91012) comes across as deep, tight, and controlled. The texture of the windings on the individual steel strings is clearly audible as Peer works the strings with breathtaking rasgueado technique that would be the envy of any classical guitarist hearing this CD. The notes ring out as Peer plucks, hammers, and hooks the strings, with harmonics reverberating into the recording venue acoustic giving a vast sense of the room-filling soundspace recreated by the Duos. The Duos recreate the soundspace of a recording better than any loudspeaker in my experience. It may be a combination of their high resolution, the dynamic capability of the horns, and the deep bass extension that pulls off the magic soundspace trick, but I am not sure. By the way, please don’t confuse soundstage and soundspace. Soundstage is the vertical and horizontal placement of the musicians on the stage. Soundspace is the sound of the environment the soundstage is in—the living, breathing, space of the recording venue. Whatever the combinations of factors are that contributes to the soundspace recreation, the Duos have them in spades.

Listening to Tony Rice play his 1935 Martin D-28 guitar on “I Am a Pilgrim” (from Tone Poems, Acoustic Disc ACD-10) and comparing it to the sound of my own Martin HD-28 brings home how close the Duos can come to recreating accurate tone and the lifelike presence of a musical instrument. It’s easy, for example, to tell Tony’s 1935 Martin D-28 from the 1952 Martin D-28 he used on “O Solo Mio” later in the album—the changes in tone due to the prewar scalloped bracing are immediately evident. While visiting Seattle, Gary Wagner (and one of his pals), a super nice guy and the talented luthier who works on Deanne’s and my guitars, picked me up at the airport and took me to the Tractor Tavern to hear John Reischman, the maestro mandolinist, play with his band while on his way through town while on tour with his band. I think John was playing a 1920s Gibson “Lloyd Loar” F-5 mandolin—it sounded incredible! I was about as far from the stage as I sit from the Duos, and when I play back John’s album “Up In The Woods” where John incorporates elements from Bill Monroe and Chuck Berry into his own original tunes (Corvus Records CR006), I get that same sense of awe and excitement I did at the band’s playing during the live performance. The only thing missing from the experience is the foot stomping, hollering, hard cider-drinking patrons, and the cigarette-smoke filled room. Ye-hah!

“Love You Madly” on Duke’s Big 4 (JVC XRCD 0022-2) places you in front of a life-size quartet right in the recording venue: Louis Bellson on drums, Ray Brown on bass, Joe Pass on guitar, and Duke on the piano—man it doesn’t get any better than these guys! Far right on stage Louis’ drum kit comes through so vividly that it seems like you should be able to reach out and touch him. Just to the left of Louis is Duke on a very life-size sounding piano. In the middle is Ray, arguably the greatest acoustic bass player of all time, in what is one of the best examples of a realistically recorded acoustic bass around. Then to the left is Joe, playing the guitar like only he can. The Duos continue to amaze me with their ability to create such life-size, natural sounding, and tangible aural images in a seemingly living, breathing, soundspace.

Kate Rusby is the current darling of the English folk artist scene, and for good reason: the expressive purity of her voice, her own accomplished acoustic guitar playing, and the accompanying acoustic instruments on her albums evoke a sense of Arthurian wonder as princess Rusby sings just for you in your castle, my Lord. This isn’t an audiophile album as the sound is a bit too thin on many systems, but it is good music making, and the Duos do justice to the music by putting warm flesh on those cold musical bones in such a fashion that I forget about audiophilia and my mind becomes lost in the music. However, the lyrics on “Radio Sweethearts” (from Hourglass, Compass Records 7 4255 2) should bring a smile to a weary audiophile’s face as they describe two lovers dancing through the night to the music of their radio: “the music was playing, clear and bright, the radio sweethearts waltzed all night”. You have done that with your stereo system, haven’t you? Well if you haven’t, you will with the Duos. You will not be able to play Kate’s album without your mind waltzing around Middle Earth as you carry a blue rose to the Lady of the Woods, with Frodo, Strider, and Gandalf to accompany you on your adventure.

The Duos serve up vocals in convincing, intimate fashion, and don’t exaggerate sibilance (an important quality for me). Whether it is Ella, Billie, Rickie Lee, Louie, Bing, or Ray Charles, the Duos portray the beauty of the music in fine fashion. Vocals have a life-like sparkle and presence about them, and when the music warrants it, a tangible beauty that will envelop you and leave you breathless.

When I really want to be blown away, I put on one of my favorite orchestral works and listen to the tapestry of low-level resolution and the oodles and oodles of musical details that emerge from the soundscape. Balalaika Favorites (Mercury Living Presence 432 000-2) has a wealth of interesting musical information, and I am constantly surprised by the Duos and their ability to uncover new and musically significant detail that I have not heard before. The Duos can unravel the complexity of an orchestra and present it with the same convincing immediacy that an excellent smaller system can with a jazz trio. And the dynamics—sometimes it feels as if I am being carried along on a gently flowing current, and then suddenly caught up in a raging tsunami as the dynamic prowess of the Duos kicks in. The Duos can go from a delicate whisper to a roar so fast that it will knock you off your audio feet if you are not ready for it. And for pipe organs look no further! On Pomp and Pipes “The Vikings” (on Reference Recordings RR-58CD) the Duos will give you a good taste of some nice low frequencies—they literally shake the floors and walls of my house. If you want to hear some good examples of purity of tone from a pipe organ, put on the King of Instruments (Delos DCD3503), and prepare to melt.

The high frequencies of the Duos sound musically natural and detailed, but don’t have that last little bit of treble extension. The mid-range is gloriously natural and revealing, and the low frequencies can be thunderous when necessary. Overall, the Duos are very good loudspeakers that do all of the normal audio tricks of imaging and soundstaging; plus a few not so common audio tricks like the realistic recreation of a living, breathing, soundspace; life-like dynamics and life-size aural images. Musically the Duos play the notes right: they have convincing tonal colors; they allow the emotional content to come through in spades, and they play the beat right. More than any other speaker that I have had the pleasure to enjoy, the Duos immerse me in an musically convincing soundspace that is a near musical epiphany at every listening session. If you want a stealth speaker system the Duos are not the right choice—every person who comes into our house and sees them immediately asks about them. They are too obvious not to notice, which at times makes me feel a little awkward. They also need a fairly big room to work right. If those caveats don’t hinder you, then you are in for the ride of your life!

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

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