Audio Physic Avantera Loudspeaker (TAS 220)

You Little Wonder, You!

TAS’s 2011 Overall Product of the Year award winners, the $60k Magico Q5 and the near-$100k Rockport Altair, may be the highest-fidelity dynamic loudspeakers that a whole lot of money can currently buy, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other cone speakers out there that do many of the things that the Magicos and the Rockports do, and for considerably less dough. Take, for instance, the new three-and-halfway floorstanding $27k Avantera from the 25-year-old German loudspeaker manufacturer, Audio Physic.

While the Avanteras don’t have beryllium tweeters, carbon-fiber-Rohacell-sandwich drivers, and massive aluminum or svelte fiberglass enclosures—and are considerably smaller and daintier than either the monolithic Magicos or the windswept Rockports—it might surprise you to know how close they come to the world-class sonics of the Big Boys (and how much solid engineering has gone into making them sound the way they do). These are German loudspeakers, after all, made by a company whose motto is “No loss of fine detail.” By this phrase AP doesn’t just mean the loss of musical detail (although that is its primary meaning). The Avanteras have been meticulously crafted and then voiced by genuine music lovers to achieve “no loss of fine detail” in playback by assuring that there is no loss of fine detail in design and build.

That design-and-build starts with an enclosure that, in some ways, reminds me of the M Series Magicos, in that the Avantera’s forward-firing high-frequency, midrange, and lower midrange cones are flush-mounted behind a one-half-inch-thick T-6 aluminum faceplate that, like the T-6 aluminum faceplate of the Magico Mini and M5, is radiussed at the edges to serves as an inert, resonance-and-diffraction-free platform for the three drivers that handle almost all of the music—the frequencies from roughly 150Hz up. As was the case with the M Series Magicos, the rest of the Avantera’s enclosure is heavily braced wood—well, MDF in the Avantera’s case—with an elaborate internal architecture of open and sealed chambers, designed (as is every other part of the speaker, including its optional, highly recommended VCF feet) by AP’s brilliant chief engineer Manfred Diestertich to lower typical cone colorations and facilitate the smooth blending of the drivers.

Since the days when Joachim Gerhard ruled the roost, Audio Physic has used “narrow-baffle” cabinets, and the Avantera’s front panel is a mere 9.4" wide. Though narrow baffles (when properly designed) unquestionably allow loudspeakers to better “disappear” as sound sources—and the Avantera does this as well as any speaker I’ve reviewed—they can also create what is known as a baffle-step issue. For those of you who don’t know what this phrase means, “baffle-step issue” refers to suckout in the all-important power range, between approximately 100Hz and 500Hz. This suckout occurs when the wavelengths that the midrange driver is reproducing are longer than the (narrow) baffle the midrange cone is mounted on. In the absence of a wider baffle, these longer wavelengths “wrap around” the enclosure, and the driver starts to work in a 4pi (omnidirectional) radiation pattern instead of a 2pi (hemispherical) one. The consequent reduction in acoustic efficiency (there is substantially less sonic energy directed toward you, the listener, in those frequencies that are being radiated omnidirectionally than in those that are radiated hemispherically) can in turn produce an acoustic hole—a valley as deep as 6dB in the lower midband and upper bass, easily heard as a marked thinning down of timbre, power, and body.

Though certain reviewers seem to feel that this baffle step issue just “comes with the territory” of narrow-front loudspeakers—and can only be corrected by DSP or tone controls—designers like Diestertich aren’t as oblivious to the problem as these Doubting Thomases seem to think. By ensuring that the midrange driver (in the Avantera’s case, the separate 5.9" lower-midrange driver) is capable of operating linearly down to 100Hz, and side-mounting the 7" woofers on a narrow baffle (in the Avantera’s case, four woofs per speaker, two on each side, operating in a push-push configuration that cancels out cabinet vibration), and setting the crossover between the woofers and the lower midrange driver at 150Hz, you get the RTA printed at the top of p. 104.

See any baffle-step problem here? I don’t. Nor, more importantly, do I hear one. Indeed, this graph (taken at 5dB/division and one-sixth-octave smoothed) is high among the most linear in-room frequency-response charts I’ve taken—not just through the power range but overall.