AVI ADM9,1

"It delivers a sound far bigger and more powerful than you would expect, with the sort of musical accuracy and honesty that you don't get at a grand and might struggle to find at £5000. The result is a product that's one of the most obvious Best Buys we've encounted in years. The revolution begins here..."
Read Alan Sircom's excellent review of our ADM9 speakers in HiFi Choice magazine

ADM9.1
A completely new model

ADM9’s have been in production for two years now and they’ve been a tremendous success, however things are changing rapidly. An increasing amount of 24 bit material is becoming available because many producers are unhappy with what record companies do to CDs to make them more “commercial” - they want people to hear their work as they produced it. As a result there are an increasing number of downloads or DVD A tracks available with better sound quality. Downloads have rendered CD players redundant for all but traditionalist Audiophiles and this makes their future even less certain because they cannot play 24 Bit material.

We’re very much a purist audiophile company (albeit one coated liberally with BS repellent!) and we're anxious to be amongst the first to get the very best sound quality that these new Studio Master Downloads and Reference Recordings will allow and to that end, we’ve completely redesigned almost every part of the original ADM9.

ADM9.1 comprise of the highest Audio Quality 24/192 DAC, a remote controlled three input Preamplifier, two optical digital and one analogue RCA - an electronic crossover and two power amplifiers (75 WPC for the tweeter and 250WPC for the bass drivers). This makes them unique in being a complete Hi Fi system in a pair of stand, wall or shelf mounted speakers.   All they need is zeros and ones. i.e. anything with a digital output.

Conventional active loudspeakers are the standard in professional recording studios, but are a not a complete system because they do not usually have a DAC or preamplifiers built in, so these need to be purchased separately for domestic use.

It is widely accepted that active loudspeakers sound better than passive ones. This is because the crossovers can be made truly transparent and power amplifiers can be optimised for the particular drive units chosen. 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 Sonos, Logitech’s Duet or Squeezebox, Apple TV, Airport Express or Roku Soundbridge. 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 with separate and larger add on power supplies, when there is absolutely no need for it in a properly designed system, especially when they cannot produce comparable sound quality to ADM9.1s that are a fraction of the cost.

Technical Specifications

Power amplifiers - High speed, linear, analogue bipolar, 75 wpc for the tweeters and 250 wpc for the bass drivers. Distortion typically better than 0.002% and dynamic range 120 dB.

Crossovers- High quality 4th order discrete analogue.

Preamplifier - High quality state of the art analogue preamplifier with two digital and one analogue input. Control is remote and volume settings are remembered for each separate input.

DAC- Up to the minute 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 enabling phase perfect crossover at 3.4 kHz. Bass extension better than - 6dB @ 60Hz.

Tweeter - 1" Silk Dome tweeter with -3 dB point of 28 kHz.

System Amplitude response better than + or - 2 dB 100 Hz - 20 kHz.

Max continuous SPL (both driven 1 m 100 hr rating) 108dB with 8dB Threshold.

The Subwoofer
Because the power amplifiers in active loudspeakers are connected directly to their drive units, they are much better controlled than is possible with passive designs, which means no boom and that a correctly designed Subwoofer  will seamlessly integrate with them. Therefor we've produced a special dedicated, ultra high powered 10" model for the ADM9's. The voice coil is 3" diameter, maximum excursion is 2" and it's in a sealed box and driven by a linear, analogue bipolar amplifier that can produce up to 30 Amps and 200 Watts. The filter can be set to 20, 30, 40, 60, 80 or 100 Hz and gain adjusted to suit room acoustics. In practice it extends low frequency excursion to below 30Hz, increases the dynamic and plants the ADM9's firmly in big speaker territory. ADM9.1s work well without a Subwoofer but better with one designed especially for them. AVI Sales dept. June '08

The back of the two speakers, and a close-up of the contacts on the left hand unit