AVI DM10 - Active System
- Thread starter Romulus
- Start date
whatsnext
Naimless
I own AVI Lab series separates and read the negativity of those who are negative towards AVI.
I heard the Lab series and decided it was more enjoyable than the Cyrus gear I was putting up with so I bought it. Many people raved about Cyrus which just didn't do it for me.
I later encountered forum opinions. They make me smile
I heard the Lab series and decided it was more enjoyable than the Cyrus gear I was putting up with so I bought it. Many people raved about Cyrus which just didn't do it for me.
I later encountered forum opinions. They make me smile
Tony L
Administrator
In fairness I don't think anyone has ever criticised the Lab Series. It was proper high-end kit with clearly defined specifications which it met. Very, very nice stuff that if anything looks to be rising in second hand value of late.
PS Very interesting to contrast and compare the PSU and heatsinking of the genuine 200 Wpc Lab Series Integrated with the "75 + 250 Watt" active speakers. Lets just say the marketing has, ahem, changed! ;-)
PS Very interesting to contrast and compare the PSU and heatsinking of the genuine 200 Wpc Lab Series Integrated with the "75 + 250 Watt" active speakers. Lets just say the marketing has, ahem, changed! ;-)
Re-Joyce
... Jason H that is.
According to AVI themselves you are using legacy kit that offers 1 three thousandth the performance of the active monitors ...
monkfish
pfm Member
Blimey, is that all, I must throw my legacy Tannoys in the bin and buy little squawk boxes, three thousand times better.
Romulus
pfm Member
Wow! I did not expect the AVI DM10 Active system to cause such different reactions and emotions. Please correct me if I am misunderstood but why do some persons regard Ashley James as arrogant? What I detect is a person who is passionate about music, has specific ways of creating Active systems and is capable of explaining his reasonings. Not only that he is willing to prove his audio beliefs via his input with the AVI DM10 active system which is priced at a fraction of the cost of an average active system. A system which has had encouraging reactions from users and one professional reviewer. Do I want to be part of it if I like the sonics - of course I do! Getting an active system able to play well all my genres of music in a medium size room involving less boxes and at a practical cost... whats there not to like..! Normally I would have to spend approx £5,000.00 - £8000.00 for a decent upgrade with some one like Naim Audio with passive speakers and that would be called a beginners system on the nursery slopes...? I am looking for a kind soul who lives in Devon and has a AVI DM10. I will bring wine,beer and light refreshments for exchange to listen to his or her's system. 
I didn't find Ashley to be a very nice chap. Well, nice as pie when I ordered some DM5s for my desktop and when I wanted to return them because they weren't for me, he launched into attacks, with comments like 'I know your game, you had no intention of buying my speakers' etc etc. WTF? I returned them and begrudgingly refunded me. He was totally unreasonable and irrational. Some might call that passionate, I certainly do not.
steve_1979
pfm Member
Here are my reasons for buying AVI:
I bought my first AVI system (Neutron Five 2.1) because I had a maximum budget of £1000 to spend and wanted some good quality computer speakers that would be good for music and also have deep bass for when I wanted to watch movies or play games. By a lucky chance of timing AVI had just stopped production of the Neutron Five system and the last few units had their price dropped from £1300 to £900 because Ashley needed to make space for other projects. I bought them unheard based on the positive reviews that I read online. It also looked like a very good value package (2 good quality passive speakers, a 10" subwoofer, a DAC, a pre-amp and 3 x 100 watts of amplification) especially compared to the other options that I looked at elsewhere for the same price.
I was very happy with the Neutron system. It sounded much better than any of the other £900 hifi systems that I'd auditioned in hifi shops. After three years of ownership, when a bit of spare money became available I upgraded to a pair of second hand DM5s. Again these were bought unheard but I did so with confidence this time as I was assured that they would sound similar to the the Neurton Five system that I loved but with a smoother and more detailed sound. They exceeded all of my expectations by a mile and I still own them now.
A year later, based on my very positive impression of the DM5s, I worked many hours of overtime and eventually saved up enough money for the DM10s. You may think that I'm crazy for spending £1500 on speakers without even hearing them first. Normally I wouldn't ever consider such a thing but as I already had a good idea of what to expect based on ownership of the DM5s I took the plunge anyway. I wasn't disappointed. The DM10s exceeded all of my expectations even more than the DM5s did.
I am now a very happy owner of both the DM5s and the DM10 2.1 system. I respect other peoples opinions if for whatever reason you dislike them, but to my ears they are perfect speakers. Even if I win the lottery I would not consider parting with them.
As for AVI marketing?
Who cares? Not me. I'm only interested in the product that I'm buying which in the case of the DM5s and DM10s are ideal for me.
JezmondTutu
pfm Member
Wow! I did not expect the AVI DM10 Active system to cause such different reactions and emotions. Please correct me if I am misunderstood but why do some persons regard Ashley James as arrogant? What I detect is a person who is passionate about music, has specific ways of creating Active systems and is capable of explaining his reasonings. Not only that he is willing to prove his audio beliefs via his input with the AVI DM10 active system which is priced at a fraction of the cost of an average active system. A system which has had encouraging reactions from users and one professional reviewer. Do I want to be part of it if I like the sonics - of course I do! Getting an active system able to play well all my genres of music in a medium size room involving less boxes and at a practical cost... whats there not to like..! Normally I would have to spend approx £5,000.00 - £8000.00 for a decent upgrade with some one like Naim Audio with passive speakers and that would be called a beginners system on the nursery slopes...? I am looking for a kind soul who lives in Devon and has a AVI DM10. I will bring wine,beer and light refreshments for exchange to listen to his or her's system.
I'm not sure that arrogant is quite the correct word but he does talk a load
of crap. Which is a shame as the product sells itself. There are other solutions out there but AVI is potentially a good one imo.
I didn't say I disliked them I simply pointed out that speakers with higher technical performance exist for significantly less money to counter claims about high performance and high value. But technical performance and value for my money are only two factors in why people opt for the speakers they do and it was interesting to know yours. Thanks.
You consider the dishonest marketing to be irrelevant to the product? As a non-technical person you recognize that you have no reliable information about the technical performance of the product, you can see one or two more technical people are less than enthusiastic but this is not a concern because the speakers seem fine to you? If a company is dishonest in one area of activity wouldn't it be reasonable to expect it in others? What type of support would you expect if your speakers develop problems and how reliable do you expect the products from a tiny under resourced setup like AVI to be?
steve_1979
pfm Member
To my ears the DM10 sound better than every other speaker that I've ever heard (passive and active systems costing upto £10k from ATC, PMC, Genelec and many more). This to me is the only thing that matters.
There are still many high performance speakers that I haven't yet heard though (such as Barefoot, Kii Three, Linkwitz or ESL/panel type speakers) so I would be very interested to hear how they compare to these.
There may be the odd exception to this but as far as I'm aware most speaker manufacturers don't provide much useful technical performance measurements other than very basic stuff like quoting 50Hz-20khz frequency range (sometimes without even mentioning the +/-dB range). So in this respect AVI is no different to most other manufacturers.
As for their method of advertising. That's no concern of mine. I'm only interested in what the speakers sound like.
Romulus
pfm Member
Instead of mentioning claims in general, please tell us exactly what it is that AVI is alleged to be dishonest. What is it so terrible that AVI is supposed to have done..?
Hmmm... It is a tiny 2 way with a 5" midwoofer, 1" tweeter on a flat baffle, 8th order crossover,... Even if it was the best example of it's kind (the flat baffle and 8th order crossover suggest otherwise) it has far too little cone area to cleanly reproduce lower frequency transients in a room at standard listening levels. Now some people are weakly constrained by price but strongly constrained by the size of the speakers and to listening at only quiet sound levels. For such people the speaker may fit their requirements well but without those constraints the driver configuration would seem to be inappropriate.
If AVI were to make a speaker that looked a good fit for my requirements I wouldn't consider risking significant sums of my money doing business with them because the dishonest marketing has lost my trust. I don't know everything there is to know about the speaker and the company behind it but if they conduct themselves in an honest way I will have more confidence in what I am being told about the product, the design and manufacture of the product, the support from the company should it be needed,...
When it comes to marketing we expect a company to dwell on the relative strengths of their products and say little about their relative weaknesses. We only tend to expect balance from independent third parties which are few and far between when it comes to home audio. So there is a line between what is considered an acceptably biased representation and what is not and that line is going to be different for different people. People's responses are also going to be different when the line is crossed. Some may take a moral position and not consider doing business with people/companies they consider to be dishonest but I suspect most, myself included, would consider the risk of doing business.
Now you state you do not care about the marketing but is this because you consider what is going on to be acceptable in this day and age and that the company has not crossed the line. Or do you consider the company to have crossed the line but that this does not alter the value of the product to you in any significant way.
To flesh things out with an example, having read the posts from the OP do you think it likely these are coming from a consuming audiophile like yourself or from someone marketing AVI products? Your comments above suggest you are not overly concerned which is fair enough but it would be interesting to know what you see in the posts and how it relates to that line.
JezmondTutu
pfm Member
I have to say you are digging yourself a bit of a hole with all this nonsense of tiny bass drivers failing to fill rooms with low bass. Who actually cares if it sounds good?
Tony L
Administrator
I don't think it is fair to attack the AVIs on what they actually are. Nice little ported stand-mounts are very popular and can be capable of surprising quality, plus they do offer a sub for those that require it (I'm no fan of subs, but that is just me). As stated countless times I actually really like the product, my beef is entirely with the gross exaggeration and hype that surrounds it. The marketing is both dirty and patronising and lies far beneath what I expect in the audio community. I am happy with both subjective appraisal and proper reviewable technical measurements, but not pseudoscience and cooked-up specifications. I have even less respect when a company using such techniques tries to attack and belittle other companies, slag off competing product etc. That is just dirty and cheap to my mind. Bottom line: nice product, shame about the sleazy used car salesman bullshit.
Still
he said his naim was ralph
Please see above. Unfortunate that you didn't make these enquiries before spending your hard earned.
steve_1979
pfm Member
This is why I use the AVI 10" subwoofer together with the DM10s (which use a 6.5" woofer not 5" one BTW). The AVI 10" subwoofer integrates totally seamlessly with the DM10s and turns them into a full range system down to below 30Hz. That's plenty low enough for me.
Ash has always seemed like a good and honest person to me (although I can see why he rubs so many people up the wrong way). As for his after sales service - well he's always promptly answered my many hifi related questions and helped me out in this way several times over the years for which I am thankful. His advice has also saved me a small fortune too.
Without checking I think the DM10s have a 2 or 3 year warranty but as all three of the AVI systems that I've owned have been 100% reliable I've never needed to put it to the test.
What is more of a concern for me is what happens if they break in 10, 20 or 30 years time? Well thanks to the way the electronics have been designed most of the parts could be replaced by a skilled electronics engineer so that's not much of a concern. The drivers might be tricky though. I think the tweeter* and DM5 5" woofer are OEM parts so they probably wouldn't be an issue to replace but the DM10 6.5" woofer and the 10" subwoofer are unique so finding a suitable replacement for these would likely be a problem.
* Off topic but interesting fact. The AVI tweeter is a specially designed tweaked version of an OEM tweeter which is modified to Martin Grindrod's specifications. Sinar Baja have now made this modified version a standard OEM item because it sounds better than the original.
narabdela
who?
I find it genuinely difficult to believe that you were unaware of the inbuilt anti-AVI bias on PFM .
I think you're just trying to scrape a scab tbh.
Tony L
Administrator
I think bias is very unfair, people here just challenge outlandish claims and respond to being directly attacked. Remember AVI brought it here, we did not take it there (I've never been a member of their forum, nor would I ever consider it)! On this thread JCBrum (a close personal friend of Ash and Martin) brought the argument back in and did so very deliberately.