Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Step two is to set the relative levels of the midrange and highs using two sturdy three-way switches, choosing among 0, +1.5dB, and –1.5dB for treble and midrange. The crossover from the midrange horns to the treble horns is at 3.5kHz, a frequency that conveniently caps the fundamental frequencies of common musical instruments. (On a standard piano, the four highest notes, including the black keys, are in the range of the tweeter; the rest are in the midrange.) I went back and forth but ultimately left the tweeter flat and set the midrange level to +1.5dB.

Next, I adjusted the subwoofer's volume to match the volume of the horns. Two buttons let you change the level, in 0.5dB increments from –20dB to +8dB; the level is displayed on a backlit LCD screen beside the buttons. It is without question the best system for doing this kind of thing that I've encountered. A setting of –5dB gave the speakers a reasonable overall balance, but at this level, the bass was prominent, casting a bright light on my room's sonic issues. I was pretty happy with this state of affairs, because I was looking forward to using the Duo's DSP system to fix the issues.

The DSP is always on, though of course it can be set to be neutral. Most DSP settings are controlled by the Control Center app, which runs not on a tablet or smartphone but on a computer. The computer connects via an Ethernet cable; connect it and up pops the app in a web browser.

With the chosen setup, the most serious issues in my 24' × 16' × 10' room were peaks at the first few room modes (the one near 55Hz was especially severe), residual nulls at my listening seat (footnote 4), and a general lack of energy across the mid- and upper bass. The last of these was the most bothersome because it falls smack in the middle of a stand-up bass's range. This could gut the jazz-combo performances that sit at the heart of my life's playlist. I endeavored to fill that gap first, then to use whatever DSP magic I had left to attack those peaks and valleys.

I spent many nights progressing through DSP settings before arriving at a setup that boosted the bass level and raised the low-pass frequency to create an overlap in the upper bass/lower midrange region. I used the eight-band equalizer to lower and shape the frequency response from the midbass on down. I stacked the narrow band filters to get rid of the worst room node at about 55Hz. Double basses in jazz combos—my most oft-used yardstick being Ray Brown's LP Soular Energy (Concord Jazz LELP 111 LP)—were present, even, and accounted for. To sum up: Cabling constraints—which few Avantgarde customers working with a dealer will have—led to a perfectly fine but less-than-ideal setup, which was rescued thanks to the Duo SD's flexibility. And I had fun doing it.

Listening
The Duos didn't sound the way I expected them to; that is, they didn't sound particularly "horny" in all the clichéd ways, good or bad. Their dynamic performance didn't convince me I was hearing live music when I stepped out into the hallway, and they didn't have the slightest trace of that PA-system sound. Nor did they sound like a good line source, or a good planar, or a good anything else in particular. They had no particular, familiar character.

In a way this was reassuring: Really good two-channel systems should converge toward the same sound regardless of the technology employed, while hopefully retaining some individual character. Maybe that "jump-factor" thing so often attributed to horns is in fact a bug, not a feature.

This is not to say that the Duos had no special individual qualities. They did, and part of it was remarkable dynamic performance. They had no problem reproducing dynamic transients of any intensity, even in music being played at levels that pushed the threshold of pain. In contrast to some other horns I've heard, they did it effortlessly, like a Ferrari loafing along at 125 and waiting for you to wake up and push on the accelerator.

Yet, until I started writing, the adjective "effortless" never crossed my mind; the Avantgardes were just doing their thing, making music.

My favorite among the more bombastic Mercury Living Presence albums is probably Aaron Copland's Rodeo - El Salón México - Danzón Cubano, performed by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Antal Doráti, conductor (Mercury Living Presence SR90172 LP). I wondered whether with the Duos, playing this loud enough would push this performance past spectacular and into overblown. It didn't. No matter how hard I pushed them, the music remained spectacular and uncongested. Impressive dynamics and remarkably low distortion, subjectively, even at extreme SPLs.

One of the most revealing tests of a system's aplomb in reproducing dynamic transients, as well as one of the coolest recordings I know, is "Under the Boardwalk" from Rickie Lee Jones's EP Girl at Her Volcano (Warner Bros. Records 1-23805 EP). How well a system goes from zero to 90dB and back to zero will make or break this cut. I've heard a lot of systems do it well, with transients beyond reproach: huge and precise, visceral even, with just the right amount of reverb. Often, though, I feel like I'm hearing a test that was aced—that the system had been designed and prepped to do exactly this: "Look what I can do!" The Duos just played the music, before, during, and after the transient. No drama. Yet Rickie's "Under the Boardwalk" had more impact and sounded more right than I could recall ever hearing it.

The ability of the Duos to present transients at the pppp end of the scale was even more impressive. I've long had a mental picture of music, as a visible entity, surrounded by air and flowing through speakers. With the Duos, this image persisted even with changes so small that they were all but inaudible. What came through most was how tangible the instruments seemed. In one instance, listening to a solo oboe of all things, I had no choice but to stop the record and sit in silence to unpack what I'd just heard. A direct emotional response. To an oboe.

That oboe couldn't have broken my heart if the Avantgardes got just the one thing right: dynamics. The full complement of audiophile goodness is necessary to produce a result like that. Apart from the performance, the qualities that come immediately to mind are that noise must be vanishingly low—check. There must be no audible distortion, however minor, to draw the attention away—check. Spatial information must be precise and accurate, temporal relationships need to be in sync, and the timbre really, really has to be just right: check, check, and check.

I can't recall another time when an instrument felt so much like I could reach out and grab it. When I focused my attention on an instrument and tried to figure out what was happening, I could discern a plethora of low-level stuff including just the right mix of edge definition and coherence. When I backed away—again, with my mind's ear—the details faded back into everything else that was emerging like a high-resolution zoom lens. There was never a doubt in my mind that every nuance of that low-level detail was present, and every nuance was a big part of what made that oboe so special.

In contrast, what I'd call midlevel detail—how clearly voices can be heard at the back of the studio during a recording, for example—weren't as obvious as the subtler shadings that put faces on those people. I used the title cut on Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (Reprise REP 54 040 LP) to describe how the T+A Solitaire S 530s that I reviewed in May 2024 presented exactly this level of detail—more voices became obvious and more convincingly located than typical, but there wasn't the wealth of fine detail I'd heard from other speakers. With the Avantgardea, the opposite was true.

The Mady Mesplé, Charles Burles, and Roger Soyer performance of Delibes's opera Lakmé (Seraphim SIC-6082 LP) has long been my go-to recording for discerning how a component portrays a live performance in a large, open venue. Perhaps most important for me is how well the spatial cues come together to create the feeling of being inside the venue and the perspective of listening to the performance from a specific place in the audience. The Duos did a good job of recreating the venue and all the spatial relationships that put me in my seat. The only glitch was that the performers on the stage, the size and shape of the stage, even the venue's interior were not quite the same in all three dimensions. The soundstage wasn't flat, but distances were a little greater side to side and top to bottom than they were front to back. This wasn't something that drew attention to itself; it was just that performers seemed compressed into layers instead of spread out across the entire stage front to back. It's worth mentioning that Avantgardes are known for the depth of the soundstage they create; this could likely be improved with room treatment and setup.

Drawing conclusions
This review involved a certain amount of fighting with room acoustics, a battle that was mostly—intentionally—self-imposed, since I allowed speaker placement to be dictated by the availability of power cords and interconnects. In this contest between speakers and room, the speakers won. The Duo's DSP didn't allow me to neutralize all the things my room was doing wrong, but they did manage to fix most things, including the things that bothered me most. The result was superb. Small jazz combos, where the key elements are percussion, horns, piano, and bass, were spot-on. They were articulate, and their timbres were harmonically dense and complex. The small amount of extra bass I dialed in to achieve a pleasing balance in jazz turned out to be great with classic rock; I flipped when I heard the clarity, definition, and presence of Chris Squire's distinctive bass guitar riffs in "Roundabout," on Yessongs (Atlantic SD 3-100 LP). If those riffs weren't burned into my memory before, they most definitely are now.

Defying even positive expectations—such as my expectation that the Duo SD would sound like a typical horn speaker—is usually a good thing, I've found. It means that something interesting is going on. Such was the case here. The Avantgarde Duo SD iTRON G3s are truly excellent speakers. I loved spending time with them and would be perfectly satisfied if they could have remained in my listening room long term. (Unfortunately, they departed months ago.) They did everything well and some things extraordinarily well. What shortcomings I heard are best attributed to the room and placement constraints and not to the Duos themselves.

The big question posed by the Duos isn't about performance, or even about price (though the Duo SD iTRON system is hardly cheap). It's whether you're willing to commit to a unique, totally different kind of system. That's up to you. I can't tell you to take the plunge, but I can suggest unequivocally that if this review raises your curiosity even a little, you should listen to a pair if you can

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Footnote 4: I adjusted the position of the listening seat by a foot or two, which reduced these nulls somewhat, but they persisted to a lesser extent at the final position.