AVI ADM9.1s Loudspeakers

AVI's ADM9 speakers were in production for nearly two years and were a tremendous success before their "retirement" in January of 2009. However, the digital world changes rapidly and AVI has always had every intention on staying "up to date". Over the last year or so, there has been an increasing number of high resolution 24 bit recordings made available to music lovers. Many record producers and artists want their audience to hear their work as was intended, and as a result a variety of high performance digital recordings are now being offered as downloads. While still somewhat rare, these "Hi-Rez" downloads have much better sound quality than that of commercial CDs, and will likely become more prevalent over the coming months. As this happens many music lovers are finding that these vastly improved downloads have rendered CD players redundant! With the quality reproduction available from these high resolution downloads, it is very easy to imagine a day in the not too distant future when all but the most traditional of audiophiles will no longer have a CD player in their system, instead they will download or stream music at a level of performance that previously was only ever experienced in the control rooms and mastering suites of the highest end recording studios!

AVI is very much a purist audiophile company (albeit one coated liberally with BS repellent!) and they were anxious to be amongst the first to get the very best sound quality that these new studio-master downloads and reference recordings allow. To that end, the team at AVI thoroughly redesigned almost every part of the original ADM9 in order to capture all the performance benefits of the new, high resolution 24 bit recordings (as well as from your existing digital media library).

The new ADM9.1 are comprised of:

• a state of the art 24bit 192kHz digital to analogue converter (DAC)
• a high performance remote controlled three input line level preamplifier featuring two optical digital and one analogue RCA inputs
• a low distortion 4th order Linkwitz-Riley electronic crossover
• two linear, bipolar power amplifiers (per speaker) with 75 WPC for the tweeter and 250WPC for the woofer
  precision engineered 1.1" tweeter and 6" long throw midbass drivers
• a rigid, highly damped enclosure finished in high quality real wood veneers or high gloss piano finish

$2250.00 per pair

ADM 9.1s Technical Specifications:

• Power amplifiers - High speed, linear, analogue bipolar, 75 WPC for the tweeters and 250 WPC for the bass drivers. Distortion is typically better than 0.002% with a dynamic range of 120 dB.
• Crossovers- High quality 4th order Linkwitz Riley discrete analogue.
• Preamplifier - High performance, state of the art analogue preamplifier with two digital and one analogue input. Operation is via infra red remote and volume settings are remembered for each individual input.
• DAC- State of the Art 24/192, completely jitter free design.
• Bass driver - Very high power handling 6.5" paper cone drive unit with 1.5" voice coil and exceptionally broad bandwidth, thus enabling a phase perfect crossover at 3.4 kHz. Bass extension rated to better than 60Hz (-6dB).
• Tweeter - 1" Silk Dome tweeter with 28 kHz extension (-3dB).
• System Amplitude response better than + or - 2 dB, 100 Hz - 20 kHz.
• Max continuous SPL (both speakers driven at 1m, 100 hr rating) 108dB with +8dB headroom.
• Dimensions - 12.25" X 8" X 12.25" inc. connectors
• Net Weight - 20 Lbs per speaker
• Shipping Weight - 55 Lbs per pair
  

This makes the ADM9.1s unique, as they are a complete Hi Fi System in a pair of compact monitor speakers, capable of stand, shelf or wall mounting. All they need is a music source (either analogue or digital) and you have a high performance, compact, efficient and versatile Hi Fi system.

Conventional active loudspeakers are the standard in professional recording studios, but are a not a complete system because they do not have a built in digital to analogue converter (DAC) or preamplifier. To use these pro market products at home, you would need to purchase a DAC and preamplifier separately, increasing both cost and clutter.

It is widely accepted that active loudspeakers sound better than passive ones. This is because the crossovers can be designed as truly transparent, and their power amplifiers can be optimized for the particular drive units. Contrary to traditional Hi Fi opinion, you achieve a far better result by integrating as much of the system as possible. There are the massive savings to be made and it is no exaggeration to state that ADM9.1s will outperform, by an appreciable margin, separates systems costing many times their price. For example despite their costing much more, our Lab Series CD player and Integrated Amplifier driving Duos/ Pro-Nine-Plus/Neutron 4's (or any passive two way speaker for that matter) simply cannot sound as good, because the quality of the front end (any front end) is sabotaged by the passive crossover in loudspeakers. This is fact, not hype.

AVI sees no sense in docking an iPod with it's comparatively fiddly interface when iTunes in a domestically acceptable computer works so much better and gives access to so much more, or there are many excellent streaming devices like Logitech's Duet or Squeezebox, Apple TV, or the Apple Airport Express. You can even use a DVD or CD player. For music lovers/collectors ADM9.1s are the perfect solution.

In these days of limited resources it's irresponsible of manufacturers to produce products that use multiple expensive metal enclosures to house everything - some even require separate and larger add on power supplies. There is absolutely no need for it in a properly designed system, especially when they cannot produce comparable sound quality to ADM9.1s at a fraction of the cost!