Boy, do audiophiles have to suffer for their obsession.
Buying a half decent hi-fi, cracking open a beer and blasting out a bit of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ – digitally remastered, natch – is never enough for these guys (and it is almost always guys into this kind of stuff).
Instead, living rooms are re-arranged in their relentless quest for sonic perfection, floors relined, sofas removed, concrete-lined hauled in, pots of cash dished out on ‘audiophile’ cables that sound exactly the same to most people, and if that’s not enough, there’s always time to wheel in Hallograph Soundfield Optimisers into their rooms.
The latest high-end, hi-fi offering to tempt sound purity obsessives are these positively ridiculous speakers that look like they were designed by Crusty the clown.
Best turnip
The result of an unholy alliance between Teac, German manufacturer Avantgarde Acoustics and possibly dad’s Army, these outrageously priced speakers look like were used in WW2 as air raid sirens.
Or perhaps used to announce the winners of the ‘best turnip’ competition at the local fete.
Horns ahoy
Employing spherical horn systems and an onboard subwoofer, the speakers come in three flavours:
The AvantGarde duo G2 offers a frequency range of 170 – 20,000 Hz for speakers and 20 – 350Hz for the subwoofer, and can knock out a total RMS power of 150W – and it’s all yours for $34,447.
Next up is the AvantGarde duo Omeg G2 which will serve up 100W (RMS) for $41,623, while the AvantGarde uno G2 also packs the same wattage for a positively economic $27,270.
While we’ve no doubt that these speakers will sound absolutely fabulous, if we were shelling out such enormous sums of cash for a sound system, we’d rather it didn’t look like it was bodged together by Captain Mainwaring and Private Godfrey.
Specs:
AvantGarde duo G2: 8Ω, frequency range of 170 ~ 20,000 Hz for speakers flag and 20 ~ 350Hz for the subwoofer for a total RMS power of 150W.
AvantGarde duo Ω (omega) G2: 18Ω, frequency range of 170 ~ 20,000 Hz for speakers flag and 20 ~ 350Hz for the subwoofer for a total RMS power of 100W.
AvantGarde uno G2: 8Ω, frequency range of 290 ~ 20,000 Hz for speakers flag and 20 ~ 350Hz for subwoofer, for a total RMS power of 100W.
