An Advent Guy

the variety and scope of selling 'two drivers in a box' is unending. sometimes 'getting back to where you once belonged' helps to put the insanity in check. the last time i was in london i heard a very infamous 2 way (oversized bookshelf) type speaker selling for 7 thousand pounds....was it cool?...oh yeah...was it in a different league than my old buddy, the large advent?... not at all.....the cabinets were 'beautiful', but a weekend with the advents reminded me that the '20 year old me' wouldn't have spent 20 seconds pondering the worth of a 7k pair of anything.

My stacked walnut cased Large Advents powered by a pair of KT88 tube monoblock amplifiers. The crossover capacitors were inexpensively upgraded (Solen caps) and the stuffing was adjusted. I also put good wire inside. These speakers have been subjected to critical review by a group of audio builder/designers who found their musical presentation to be remarkably good and competetive with very high end systems. Soundstage breadth and depth is perhaps the most immediately impressive feature of the inverted stacks. Bass authority is hard to beat, even with a sub, and detail, transparency, and extension are all there. See Harry Pearson's review in The Absolute Sound archives for the stacked pair. Mine sound better due to the capacitor replacement. I am using a $4K pair of beautiful, superb modern speakers plus dual subs, but they do not match the Large Advents in some of the dimensions mentioned above. If my wife would relent, I would move them back to the living area and perform further tweeks.

See Harry Pearson's review in The Absolute Sound archives for the stacked pair. Mine sound better due to the capacitor replacement.

That I will do. In the meantime, here's J. Gordon Holt's review of a single pair of regular Advents from Jan. 1976.

I worked at an audio store at that very time. We carried Advent, ESS, JBL, Infinity, Dahlquist, and Ohm loudspeakers. Our upscale speakers--Dahlquist DQ10, Ohm F, ESS AMT-1b, etc. all cost around $800/pair and were in the dedicated high end room. When I asked our manager why we didn't have a display of double Advents in the high end room, he said, "Because then we wouldn't sell anything else.'

Check out the Stereophile measurements of the Smaller Advent. It is commendably linear from 200 to 15KHz, even for today, although treble response drops like a stone above 15KHz. The +5dB bass hump centering on 60 Hz is no worse than most small speakers today.

I worked at that store in SoCal in 1975 and 1976. We had so many people coming in wanting Marantz or Pioneer receivers powering JBL speakers, and we tried to show them the Yamaha/Advent combo as an alternative because we felt that the Yamaha's superior speed and lower distortion combined with the Advent's smoothness and linearity would provide more long term satisfaction.

I bought a pair of the original "smaller" Advents at a yard sale for $20 and I was extremely impressed. I loaned them out, however, and an amp failed and gave them pure DC. Since there was no sound the amp was left on until smoke started coming out of the cabinets. The heat from the woofers started the insulation on fire inside the cabinet and filled the room with smoke. Too bad because those speakers sounded really good.

Advent speakers (along with AR and KLH) really implemented the "acoustic suspension" principle, where the enclosed air provided the "spring" for the woofer. Hold one of those old drivers in your hand and see how the cone flops around when you move it. On one occasion I had reason to replace the woofer in a KLH12 system. The woofer free air resonance was individually measured and marked on the cone. 14 Hz. It's hard to find a woofer today at much less than 30Hz. You can still buy a speaker system with an "enclosed" cabinet, but I don't think any are truly "acoustic suspension". Some kind of hybrid I guess. The air spring is much more linear than any mechanical suspension, and leads to low distotion.