The New Advent Loudspeaker Review (Vintage Speaker)

[thewas]

As with quite many old loudspeakers the measurements are better than many would expect, just like many loudspeakers of that time tuned with different target, that is wide directivity and rather flat sound power as usual living rooms of that time had a lot of carpets compared to the more empty and reflective rooms of today.

 

[twofires]

I see a few on ebay for less than $300 shipping from Japan. If you all put the money together, I will buy and test it.

You have to be careful with NS1000s. The woofer magnet was glued on with a glue that has not held up over the decades. A big drop can dislodge them and then the driver is practically a write off unless you find a repairer who really knows what they are looking at. Basically you want to find a pair locally, and transport them carefully, on their backs. That's what I ended up doing.

As for their performance, my experience is the beryllium is super fast and resolving, but can fatigue over time. Piano sounds extremely convincing (you'd figure Yamaha would get that right), and there doesn't seem to be any bass overhang, but there's not much bass extension, certainly not enough for your liking. It's a low excursion paper cone, after all. Directivity is probably crap, hence all the felt ring mods you see out there. They're a speaker that do some things very, very well out of the box, but would need a sub and dsp to get the ASR tick. Still, I'd wager you wouldn't find anything better from that era.

 

[Chrispy]

My first pair of decent speakers were the Original Advents, would love to see someone send in one of those for testing (and having heard both back then I much preferred the Original Advent).

 

[Robin L]

A little historical context for ya'll: this 1971 issue of Stereophile has a review of the original Advent. J. Gordon Holt has a rather high opinion of the speaker. There is also a direct link to the review at Stereophile's site, but the layout/typography of the original has a certain je ne sais quoi.

Stereophile-1971-Spring.pdf (worldradiohistory.com)

 

[Tom C]

Right after I finished college, got my first job and moved out of the house, my uncle gave me a pair of speakers and a Marantz receiver. Seems to me it was a pair of these or pretty close to the same. They came with low, maybe 6-in high stands. At first I put the speakers directly on the floor, figuring the stands were BS. Very weak bass. I tried the stands, and what a difference! Much better bass. Hmm, so maybe placement does matter.
Few years later, newly married, was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, and the neighbor in the downstairs apartment had his stereo very loud. My wife put our speakers face down and cranked the volume all the way up. Took maybe 15 seconds to fry the tweeters. Speakers blown, she gets a broomstick and starts pounding in the floor as hard as she could. Next thing you know, there's a knock on the door, and there's a giant of a man standing on the other side. Turns out he's a rookie pro football player for the Browns (we were in Cleveland). I sheepishly let him know his music was a bit loud, we're trying to enjoy our holiday dinner, and could he please turn it down. He did!
She didn't seem a bit bothered the speakers were ruined. We not married anymore.

 

[Robin L]

Stereo Review weighs in on the original Advent speaker, page 40:

HiFi-Stereo-Review-1970-03.pdf (worldradiohistory.com)

 

[SKBubba]

I have a pair of Original Large Advent speakers. They are Franken-vents.

Bought them used ca.1973-4 from the original owner who had sold them and then bought them back. I think I paid about $100.

The second owner was an EE student who replaced the original crossovers with his own design.

Sometime around 1976-7, I smoked one of the tweeters during a loud party using a crappy amp driven way beyond clipping. (I think that was the time the cops showed up, but I may be, uh, hazy on that detail. I mainly remember the Mrs. and me not getting arrested despite the cloud of, uh, smoke that rolled out the front door onto the cops. I will forever be grateful to them for just laughing and telling us to turn it down and leaving.)

So the repair guy replaced both tweeters with factory "fried egg" replacements (so they'd be matched and all.) When I picked them up, the repair guy asked where we got those crossovers? Nice design, he said.

We used them for many more years until the woofer foam rotted. We got some Klipsch Quartets to replace them, which I still have. (They've since been refurb'd, too).

The broken Advents sat in at least three garages for 25(?) years as we moved about.

A couple of years ago we were setting up a bonus room in our new house. I wanted a stereo in there, but didn't want to spend a lot of money. I sent the Advent woofers off to some guy in Nashville to have them professionally re-foamed. I resurrected a 15 year old honest 100w Denon AVR from a closet to drive them. I made some speaker stands from $5 wooden storage crates from Lowes, painted black. I replaced the grill cloth (that we'd previously replaced with something darker) with some fabric that looked more like the original. I still had one of the original badges in a sock drawer, but had lost the other one. I found some guy on e-bay who makes exact replica vintage speaker badges, and he provided perfect matches for just a few dollars.

Anyway, I was just listening to them today. Loud. They sound great. I came downstairs and told the Mrs. "With the music selections and the speakers, it sounds like 1970 up there! Except with a better amp."

Yeah, they're by no means perfect, but that's not the point of these speakers for me. Good times, good memories. Much fun.

 

[amirm]

One question--I'm not sure what the first graph represents--the one showing the 3 tweeter levels and distortion. Why doesn't the response track the other measurements?

That is a near-field measurement about half a meter away and at some random height. Often reflections cause some cancellations in the response. I was just interested in the relative levels for the switch and didn't try to optimize it. Klippel allows conversion of that response to anechoic but it is some work and I have not made that correction in quite a while.

 

[Keith Conroy]

Thanks Amir and Dennis for the intresting look back in time. It measured kinda ok considering the age. Can't help wondering what a dsp crossover could do for this.

I wanted to also thank Dennis and Amir for the look back in time. I was a teen in the double Advent era. This was a stack of two Advent speakers on each stereo side. The look back review was supported by today's state of the art test equipment. This type of test equipment was only a dream, when the Advents were designed. Frankly at the time the Advents were thought to have great deep bass. Also the highs were thought to be pretty smooth. This would be as compared to the JBL L-100's of the era. Lastly there were small Advents and large Advents. The manual Amir listed does not seem to match the model tested? With a slight bit of work the grill should pry off. It would be interesting to see which tweeter, they are using? In later years they used a straight dome tweeter and a more sophisticated crossover. Early versions used cone tweeters. Maybe Dennis can weigh in on this. It's clearly a piece of audio history. Now let's test an EPI 100!

 

[Aperiodic]

Somebody send in an A-25 to test. Just make sure the crossover network (one non-polarized electrolytic capacitor) is in good condition.

 

[mhardy6647]

That treble brightness may have been endemic in Henry Kloss' loudspeakers. Having just been fiddlin' around with three pairs of KLH Sixes, I noted that they sound pretty good but noticeably more piercing than I (at any rate) prefer.

DSC_0219 (2) by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

Although the KLH Six was, arguably, its direct predecessor, I never much cared for the OLA ("Original Large Advent") FWIW.
There is a pair of OLAs in the basement, and I even have replacement foams for them, but have never worked up the gumption to refoam them.

The reported LF response of the NLA in this review makes me wonder about the "professional reconing" (refoaming?) of the woofer. One thing that the New England cadre of acoustic suspension loudspeakers can do, in room, is astonishing bass response if fed with gobs of power.

 

[Robin L]

One the one hand, I think my ADS 400 speakers would be a great test subject. On the other hand, I'm not about to let them go.

 

[mhardy6647]

Somebody send in an A-25 to test. Just make sure the crossover network (one non-polarized electrolytic capacitor) is in good condition.

I could do that if no one else is in a position to.
It would, unfortunately, be 'spensive to ship coast to coast (although the A-25, thankfully, is relatively small and relatively light).

the sensitivity roll-off in the bass is quite characteristic of that era.

what's really surprising is the distortion graph :/

I think that was pretty much endemic in the small box, AS alignment loudspeakers of the era -- at the least, Col. Klipsch used to rail at the high distortion of his low-sensitivity New England competition.

 

[Aperiodic]

As far as I know they didn't have crossover in the woofer. They let the woofer to roll-off without being cut. They only use cross over in the tweeter and I think it was a single capacitor.

That was the arrangement in the Dyna A-25. Thought the Advent was a little more 'sophisticated' but never had one open. I had A-25's and my next door neighbor had Advents.

 

[Dennis Murphy]

I wanted to also thank Dennis and Amir for the look back in time. I was a teen in the double Advent era. This was a stack of two Advent speakers on each stereo side. The look back review was supported by today's state of the art test equipment. This type of test equipment was only a dream, when the Advents were designed. Frankly at the time the Advents were thought to have great deep bass. Also the highs were thought to be pretty smooth. This would be as compared to the JBL L-100's of the era. Lastly there were small Advents and large Advents. The manual Amir listed does not seem to match the model tested? With a slight bit of work the grill should pry off. It would be interesting to see which tweeter, they are using? In later years they used a straight dome tweeter and a more sophisticated crossover. Early versions used cone tweeters. Maybe Dennis can weigh in on this. It's clearly a piece of audio history. Now let's test an EPI 100!

The owners manual is for the model Amir tested. I didn't use the grill in my testing and fiddling, and the tweeter is definitely the second generation "fried egg" tweeter used in the original Advent. It was a combination cone-dome, a design that was also used in vintage KLH speakers ("K" stands for Henry Kloss, after all). There's a good bit of discussion in the manual on why the tweeter level was increased. The manual is not only a good read, it has a refreshing degree of marketing restraint, to whit:
"The New Advent Loudspeaker, then, can radiate significantly more energy at 10,000 Hz than our original design...........We don’t believe that the difference is great enough to make more than a tiny percentage of present Advent Loudspeaker owners want to trade in their speakers. (We don’t design any of our speakers, including the least expensive, to make people want to trade them in after the honeymoon, however long, is over.) But the change is the kind we think should be made in a speaker designed to compete in the "best" category without compromise."

 

[jkasch]

I bought the original Advents In '72. The crossovers were said to be 1500hz and the tweeters were indeed fragile. I had one replaced under warranty. I purchased the New Large Advents when they were introduced in '77. The NLA added ferro fluid and raised the cross over a bit. But unlike some here, I preferred the NLA and sold the originals. I still have them in my exercise room and they function fine, although I refoamed them years ago. When I compared the Advents to similarly priced JBL's (L19's?) I thought the the JBL had hands cupped around mouth coloration. However, I was unaware of the huge effects rooms and placement at the time, as were most of us.

 

[wwenze]

This is impressive for a 1977 product. I mean considering the "famous speaker of that time" is LS3/5a and friends.

 

[Beave]

Measurements look surprisingly nice for such speaker.
These are not about "bass" and playing loud as well. Probably meant to be used near or even on a wall, that adds bass support.
Judging them with the same measure (and using same way) as, say, active Adams T5V is strange a bit

This is an important point. Bookshelf speakers back then were often actually put on bookshelves, or right against the wall behind them. Doing so added quite a bit of bass and lower midrange body, making them more balanced and less bright.

I snagged a pair of small Advents just a couple years ago. Out away from walls, like my other speakers, they were quite bright. Up against the wall behind them, they sounded much more balanced and not so bad for older, cheaper speakers.

 

[Dennis Murphy]

The reported LF response of the NLA in this review makes me wonder about the "professional reconing" (refoaming?) of the woofer. One thing that the New England cadre of acoustic suspension loudspeakers can do, in room, is astonishing bass response if fed with gobs of power.

I owned the six's as well--until I traded them in on a pair of KLH 5's. The Six's were way less bright than this sample of the NLA. I tried to score another tweeter to make sure this one wasn't out of spec, but couldn't find one. I do recall seeing a measurement of the tweeter someplace else, and it looked like mine. I'm sure the reconing job didn't do the bass response any good, and this speaker didn't go as low as I had recalled. But The Fs was 21 Hz, which is close to the original spec of 19 Hz.

 

[Beave]

I was just a boy in the 70s, but I vividly remember speakers owned by parents of my friends in the neighborhood where I grew up.

They were all placed on the floor, against the wall behind them, or in a bookshelf and again up against the wall behind them.

At what point did "bookshelf" speakers (or home speakers in general) start getting designed for full BSC and no longer relying on placement against the wall to reinforce bass?