I think I was a bit to the right of the tweeter. Reference axis was the tweeter center or as best I could determine through the grill. I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of about 1%. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). Interesting that it didn't have this negative stigma then.įascinating that its max power rating was just 15 watts! I fed it a lot more than that. It is horrible material and seemingly falls apart by just looking at it. There is also this bit of advertising about it:Īs a woodworker, I detest particle board. It is written as if it is an article for a hi-fi magazine! It is very boastful of its design approach without appearing too arrogant.
There is a site with a copy of the manual which I highly recommend to check out: I measured the difference as you will see later. Story is that this was to adjust for lack of uniformity of the recordings of the era and not to tune the speaker. I didn't take a picture of the back side but there is a 3-way switch to adjust the high frequencies. This speaker is in reasonably good shape seeing how it is made out of fragile particle board: The woofer has been professionally reconed. He has looked it over and replaced a crossover capacitor to make sure it has the value it originally had. The sample under test was kindly provided by our own Murphy. This is a review and detailed measurements of the "The New Advent Loudspeaker" vintage speaker, circa 1977.
Amir's review puts a smile on my face, as I think about the upward curve of domestic sound reproduction as but one of the myriad significant blessings in my life so far. While now I am older, and slightly less penniless, I welcome the interval progress in speaker design and materials that brought us better choices and much, much better sound. The price of the MLs in (devalued) italian Liras was in the many millions and comparable to price of luxury sedan automobile. They played a good pressing of Dark Side of the Moon: I sat in religious silence and left speechless as I compared the sound of the Advents/ML/Supex with the sound in my bedroom of a system composed of Dual record player/Shure 91 ED/Grunding RTV 700 receiver (10 W/ch on 4 ohm!) and AR 4-x (with the unreliable and scratchy potentiometer for the tweeter level). I was near the end of my High School, driving a Vespa PX125E and functionally penniless from a relatively well-off family. My memory of the New Advents dates back to a 1978 visit with my late father and my girlfriend at the time (Patrizia) at an Hi-Fi expo at Fiera di Milano, when they were chosen by the Mark Levinson dealer to showcase their ML-2 Class A 25 W mono-block power amps, JNC-2 preamp and a Supex MC cartridge on a Thorens record player.