I added a new zone today, found a great pair of actives that were too good of a deal to pass up. The problem was I wasn’t sure where I was going to put them or what I was going to feed them with. I finally decided the living room because there is no music available and there should be. The issue is this is a high WAF scrutiny zone. I also needed a discrete way to feed them an optical connection.
Luckily everything worked out, as these are hifi actives with beautiful real wood veneers as opposed to true pro monitors, and they passed the WAF. Found an old gen3 Apple TV, so nice Roon can talk to it, and I could care less about resampling to 48khz for now. Score a point for roon.
I did not have a lot of flexibility with positioning, and their were some issues with bass boom and some glare through the upper mid band. I started to lose hope a little until it occurred to me that I could apply parametric eq through roon!
Holy f***! Problem solved in less than an hr! Incorporated the ATV into the roon system to feed the actives, and am also able to apply paratmetric eq via dsp to only this zone! Incredibly elegant, nothing more to buy, no implications to my other zones!
Sitting here sort of amazed as I reassess the roon ROI, and realize how beyond it goes past my initial expectations.
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Of course you cannot write such a positive post without mentioning which actives you bought…
Ha, sorry. They are obscure speakers from a British company called AVI, they are 9.1s. I owned them pre kids, sold them when I had my first and now 9 years later found a pair for a song and bought them before knowing what I was going to do with them.
Not sure they are quite state of the art anymore, but they were ahead of their time with 250/75 watt amplifiers, line level xo with integrated analog preamplifier and 24/192 dacs that are remote controlled. Well finished too!
I will put them in my main system in the coming weeks and see how they stack up.
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They get some great reviews and the DM12’s look fantastic, AVI are based in Gloucester which is only down the road from my hometown. When I go home for a visit I think I might demo a pair. I’d never heard of them before your post.
http://www.avihifi.co.uk/index.html
Not obscure to me! I have an AVi pre-power set up from back then and I recall that the AVI active speakers were very favourably reviewed at the time. If you need support (replacement tweeters etc) there is a facebook page which may be of help, run by Ashley James.
Yeah, your correct. They are obscure in the US. Not sure why they could never get proper distribution here.
I am aware of the Facebook page. Thanks. Ashley can be a good laugh!