Avalon Compas

Sidekick, I think your thread was a bit early as the Compas was only debuted at the Hong Kong AV show in August last year. I got some feedback that the standard Compas (with ceramic tweeter) is competitive with the Eidolon Diamond which is impressive, and naturally the Compas Diamond would be better again.

Avalon are using the latest generation of Accuton black coated ceramic (BCC) drivers including BBC ceramic/honeycomb long throw bass drivers & as far as I can tell the very latest OEM Accuton CELL concept BBC concave ceramic midrange & ceramic or (optional) diamond concave tweeter. I am trying to confirm this with Avalon.

The CELL midrange & diamond tweeter have the advantage of the same acoustic center for the tweeter and midrange for time coherency, perfect signal settle and piston behavior of the dome even close to the dome resonance, steady decay of higher order harmonics & high bandwidth. All this adds up to a more seamless integration of the midrange & tweeter and better overall time coherency. Of course, these speakers are perfectly phase coherent as well & I would expect they have even better time coherency than the Eidolon Diamonds.

I will post back when I get a response from Avalon re: the Accuton CELL drivers.

Hi Sidekick, I was able to confirm the Compas is using the very latest Accuton OEM CELL concept drivers, including either a BCC or optional Diamond 1" tweeter & 4.5" BCC ceramic midrange. And over and above the OEM specification, Avalon further apply proprietory modifications to push their pedigree a bit further. I know Vandersteen gets all the kudos for developing time-aligned drivers, but these drivers are the real deal as well.

I like the direction Avalon have taken with this speaker. The latest OEM Accuton drivers allow greater power handling, accuracy & time alignment. The choice of twin 9" bass drivers means the Compas will have significantly faster bass and better dynamics than the Eidolon, and the new, narrower cabinet features additional faceting around the tweeter to eliminate phase distortions and improve disperion. The narrower cabinet (compared to Eidolon) also helps the speakers disappear in the room.

Another interesting fact is the Compas also has some elements which have directly filtered down from the $300k Tesseract, including the midrange & diamond tweeter. Tesseract also uses an 11" BCC mid-bass version of the 9" ceramic bass unit in the Compas. The Compas incoporates Avalon's latest thinking and the latest drivers & looks set to position itself between the Transcendent and Time. Personally I see the Compas Diamond as like the Infinity IRS-Beta was in it's time; way better than it has a right to be for the money.

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03-30-13: Wattsperchannel
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And you would be a Dealer? The Compas Diamond is using newer generation CELL concept drivers which offer superior sound and coherency.