In every area of sound reproduction except Hi Fi, active loudspeakers predominate. In Hi Fi there is a belief that speakers and amplifiers must be selected separately to be sure that both are the best. AVI doesn’t accept this as logical since it has led to situation where many loudspeaker manufacturers don’t seem to understand the impact of their designs on amplifiers, thus they have to be more substantial and more expensive than would be the case if they did. And if reliability and sound quality problems are to be avoided.

AVI makes very robust and substantial power amplifiers with stunning sound quality because they are needed for our very highly regarded Trios and Brios. These are three way speakers and a more complex load, however our two-way models are easy and only need really good sounding amplifiers with plenty of headroom. Fortunately for us, these are rare, so we’ve designed some. Now you can have really good active speakers at a fraction of the cost of buying a separate power amplifier and with far better sound quality. These are high power, linear amplifiers with toroidal mains tranformers and produce peaks of 300 watts.

An increasing number of people are using computer based music libraries and DVD players. They may still have a CD player for when they want absolute sound quality but for a vast amount of music, some of questionable production quality in the first place, there is no discernable sacrifice if it is recorded at 256kbps or above. In fact the result is better than a surprising number of well-reviewed Hi End CD players! A Mac Mini is tiny, its keyboard and mouse are radio controlled and can be stored in a drawer until they are needed. The rest of the time there is an infrared handset for media functions. It can be used to play and record CDs and DVDs, as a TV and terrestrial DAB receiver and as a computer as well. The line output from Mac computers is legendary which is why so much music is produced with them.

PCs do not have good sound quality but are far cheaper so it’s to be expected, but again upgrades are far less expensive than with specialist Hi Fi because manufacturing quantities are so much greater. An M-Audio 24/96 sound card is about £65 and some of our customers report that it’s indistinguishable from £1000 stand alone DACs! It is certainly very good if not quite to AVI standards. www.tranquilpc.co.uk  make Hi Fi sized PCs without cooling fans and these can be adapted to individual requirements.

Finally it worth pointing out that anyone who has tried an Ipod (or some MP3 players) through his AVI Hi Fi system has been astonished at just how good it is, not surprisingly we have customers buy them to use with our Active speakers – they don’t like headphones but Ipods sound stunning through good Hi Fi.

AVI’s Amp-Paks are retro-fittable to any of our two-way loudspeakers or you can just order active speakers to use with any preamplifier of acceptable cost and performance.

Amp-Pak Specifications

Input sensitivity	1 volt
Input impedance	47K Ohms
Peak power	300 watts

Ultra low distortion Bi-Polar Class AB power with linear power supply