Advent Speakers (again)
It may be the time of year, but for some reason there are a lot of Advents listed for sale around here. They are respectable if the right vintage and there are a few of the good ones out there. There is even one set of double Advents.
If you do not know about doubles I am going to tell you. Back in the day somebody put one pair of the original Advents (later called the Larger Advent) on top of another. Why they did it is lost in the mist of time. It may have been a cheat to get more power out of an amplifier. If you hook them up in parallel they go from a nominal 8 Ohms to 4. That doubles the power until you hit current limiting. That is a good possibility.
For whatever reason something happened. No less a golden ear than the editor of Absolute Sound praised them as very good. Good enough to take an enviable place on the list. They said it took a lot more money and size to actually surpass the quality of this simple expedient. A LOT MORE MONEY.
Back in those days the Ne plus Ultra speaker was the Infinity Servo Static. A close competitor was a three panel system called the Magneplanar Tympani. Also there were the Quad ESLs and not many more. One was chosen over the other by what the listener preferred as opposed to which one was better. There is an important difference you know.
The Double Advents were considered by these estimable people as just below that top level, but still really really good. I had a DA setup in my College Dorm Room. One Pair was mine the other belonged to a friend who was flirting with a strange speaker made in Brazil or was it Argentina?
I learned a lot about sound and music and actually electrical engineering with those. My friend was an electrical engineer. He was learning about all sorts of equations to describe what happened inside the boxes that contained our hobby. It was interesting.
Double Advents had twice the area of speaker driver. They pushed twice as much air around. The ideal speaker surface should be the size of a wall. It will push evenly over the air surface and have perfect matching to the room acoustics. This is called impedance matching. The bigger the surface of the speaker the better the match.
No speaker is the same dimension as the room wall. Some try. Arguably the best try was a speaker first built in the 1930s as a folded horn. An Acoustic Horn is like a transformer that converts small drivers areas moving a bit to large areas moving a lot less. That is why brass instruments can get so loud. The relatively minor size and motion of a players lips is converted to a large area.
If you double the size of the speaker you get twice as good impedance matching. Still not perfect, but better compared to not doubled.
Another thing is it made the speaker sound bigger. Well it is bigger. That stretched the perception of the image of the musicians over a bigger stage. If you listen to classical music the perception of the physical layout of the orchestra is a big part of the experience. This is less so in multi-miked or tracked recordings of popular music, but if decently engineered you appreciate it.
At the time this set up was considered about 85 to 90% of the way to audio nirvana. The law of diminishing returns is especially cruel in audio. That last 10% is a minefield of contradictory opinions and if you have to ask the price you cannot afford it.
I am tempted. I have a pair of Advents. I could have another pair for a few hundred bucks. Then I would have the DAs once again. My real problem is I have a better system already. I really should sell the ones I have. I will talk to my daughter again. I thought of gifting her my vintage system and Christmas is coming.