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As an active Audioshark participant for the past few years, it's come to my attention that I've not really properly introduced myself and my audio cable business, Avanti Audio, LLC. In order to clear up any past or present confusion regarding my audio cable business I'd like to share some detail on our history.
1. Avanti Audio, LLC is my business, soley owned and operated by me. I am not a sales agent for another cable business selling their audio cable wares (not sure how this misconception may have gotten started?)
2. Avanti Audio is backed by 60+ years of electronic engineering and electronic assembly experience & expertise. This depth of experience is spread between myself and my Father who spent his entire working career as an Electronics P.E. and is recently retired.
3. Between my Father and I, we have designed all of the Avanti Audio cable assemblies together, including our custom Cable Conditioner appliance.
4. All audio cable assemblies (IC's, Speaker cables, Power cables, Digital cables, MIC cables, custom requests, etc.) are assembled & soldered by yours truly (Mike) in Avon, CO USA.
5. All audio cable assemblies that I manufacture follow tried and true (and often unique) engineering principles for termination, grounding schemas and in some cases filtering technologies that are found in products costing many times over and above what the Avanti Audio Allegro cable line costs. This added technology design is provided as "standard build" in the Avanti Audio Allegro line of audio cables.
CONSISTENCY OF BUILD & BUILD QUALITY:
No matter the brand or manufacturer, once an audio cable design is settled upon, listening tests are conducted, parts are sourced, costing exercises are vetted and the decision to move forward with production of a given cable product is OK'd there's still the last critical step that can make or break a brand or product.....build quality and consistency of the product itself.
Perhaps one of the most difficult factors in building audio cables is the conistent and proper assembly of the parts themselves.
Sure, the various parts that comprise a given cable build can be thrown together in a fashion with mediocre soldering, mis-measured lengths of protective sleeving or other coverings, inconsistent stripped and tinned wire ends, odd lengths of heat shrink terminations, etc. and the cables might well sound fine but they'll likely look like ass or like they were assembled by someone without pride in their work. Conversely, a given cable build can be dressed up in an immaculate fashion on the surface with all kinds of jewelry to make them gorgeous but at the core, the materials and workmanship could be subpar to the point of joint failure or other problem after the cable has been in service for some time.
The key for us is to build audio cables with the utmost attention to quality with regards to design, materials, using the right tools and the tool handling itself. Proper attention to detail is required both during the core assembly AND when applying the surface dressings or cosmetics. It's not too often you'll find an audio cable product that upholds both principles of executing the highest build quality + beautiful finishes at prices that won't break the bank. You can count on Avanti Audio cables to be one such brand. I'm not saying that Avanti Audio stands alone in providing high build quality & beautiful finish work as there are certainly other products their equal or more, but in most cases those products also generally come with an increased price tag and sometimes by many, many fold.
I'd like to share something with you completely aside from cable building, but yet has "assembly consistency" at its core....tying fishing flies. I've been tying flies since age 12 and sold them commercially to fly shops and fishing suppliers from about age 16 until I turned 40 or so (I'm 48 now). When you tie fishing flies to sell and you hand somebody a container of 6 dozen Flashback Pheasant Tail nymphs for example, they can't all look different with different bulk, different tail length, different thorax dimensions, etc. They HAVE to look identical to each other. Similarly, if you provide a fly shop with say, those same 6 dozen FBPT's (identical in look) and they get sold to customers and that same day the customer comes back in complaining that though the fly caught fish for them, it fell apart or came unraveled after only one fish was landed, then guess who's not getting another fly order from the fly shop? Like building audio cables, fly tying demands attention to detail regarding materials selection, build integrity and cosmetics that are consistent and attractive.
This is how consistency is learned - yes I'm a bit anal retentive:
I bet I've tied several thousand of this fly over the years:
MATERIALS SELECTION:
The Avanti Audio cables are almost all built utilizing ultra fine strand, high purity (five nines) oxygen free copper conductors. The exceptions are our 75ohm SPDIF Digital IC's that use a high purity copper solid conductor and Power Cables that use a high purity OFC copper with silver plated conductors. In general, we feel that copper conductors match a great number of gear and speaker types and provide a rich sonic experience without driving the price upward beyond affordable for many listeners.
All soldered connections are assembled with Cardas Quad Eutectic solder.
Standard connector choices range from Wattgate and Furutech Edison and IEC power connectors; Neutrik gold pin black metal shell XLR connectors for Balanced cables; ViaBlue (Germany) RCA, Banana and Spade speaker connectors; and ICM Gold Plated RCA or BNC Compression connectors for the 75ohm SPDIF Digital cables.
Most any other Furutech or WBT connector may be ordered if the customer wants a model different than our standard offerings.
I'll stop here for now as I'm getting a little wordy. Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to comment or ask questions. My hope is that this thread will become a place for any future Avanti Audio specific discussion.
Thanks,
Mike
aid full price [damn it] and Mike asked for no endorsement...
