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Merlin wrote:

If they are modifying conventional drive units by hand, the labour costs alone can be prohibitively expensive. The fact that they are using heavy Alnico magnets and coating the diaphrams suggests that these units do not cost a "few bucks" each. It's also worth noting that with the likes of the Omega Duo you are also buying some fairly robust amplification and rather clever crossovers from what I can see. in short I think it's wrong to discount them - especially as the likes of the Duo are considerably less expensive than the base Cessaro

I did hear that Avantgarde went Alnico and it is very good – ceramic must not be used for HF drivers, unless the speaker is driver by SS PP transformer-less amplification.

In my time Trio used ceramics. It is not necessary to view Avantgarde’s Trio as some kind serious speaker manufacture from whom you might ask a lot. Avantgarde was happed what Avantgarde owner inherited plastic manufacturing shop after his father. For him it was absolutely irrelevant what plastic to press – tooth brushes or any other commercial molds. Somebody proposed to make bid ABS-made horn – why hot – and the Avantgarde Acoustic was born. Avantgarde people know absolutely nothing about sound or even audio and they outsource the entire speaker’s R&D to third party. It is a routine thing in Europe – many manufactures do it. So, there were found drivers for Avantgarde. Here what Trio used.

Bass channels: Trio came with 4 active twin woofer sealed enclosures – they were garbage and did not spent a lot of time to investigate the drivers and I got rid of the Avantgarde woofers…

Upperbass channels: Avantgarde used 8” Italian-made (I do not remember the company name), paper-cloth, 103dB sensitive cone driver with open back into 4” 115Hz horn. The driver was nice but de-tonal and with zero articulation. There are many reasons why it was so; one of the reasons was that Avantgarde did not high-bass the channel, there were other reasons …

MF channels: Avantgarde used aluminum cone 110dB driver from 600Hz to 5000Hz, with no phase plug. It was very interesting – it had no back chamber and the cone was damped with ferrofluid. It was very interesting performer but also very much tonally immuned. I mean it had “tone” but very “contemporary”, the high tech tone. Still, we never know when tone comes in audio. I would LOVE to have the same type of the driver with Alnico magnet and to see how it behaves, though I am not a big ferrofluid drivers fun. The idea was very lucrative and to my knowledge no one try it now.

HF channel: was off the time alignment reservation, 110dB, aluminum cone, ceramic with no back chamber. Again, the concept is very interesting – free suspended aluminum cone bouncing off the front chamber…

So, regardless how Avantgarde performed but they had many thoughts in their driver – not just buy out the ready to go TADs (if it was what Cessaro did)…

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