Soon after, Advent developed the 200/201, the first audiophile cassette deck, with built-in Dolby circuitry and a large, professional-grade VU meter and, later, the visually distinctive and eminently musical 300 receiver, with circuitry designed by a very young Tomlinson Holman, who would later found Apt and THX.īut in 1972, Kloss wanted to make a less expensive speaker, and began to develop the Smaller Advent. The Advent featured a small, hard-dome tweeter and a 12' air-suspension woofer and was available in a cabinet of MDF (standard) or real wood. In 1970, Kloss developed the original Advent Loudspeaker, which represented his latest thinking on the acoustic-suspension bookshelf speaker. When Henry Kloss left KLH in 1967 to found Advent, his goal was to develop a commercially viable large-screen television. The word that summarized Advent's approach to product design was innovation. I commandeered Larry's speakers as subjects of a 'vintage' review for Stereophile. Larry then admitted that his own Smaller Advents, bought in 1972, still sounded great. I pointed out that the speakers I now review sound far more natural and detailed than designs I reviewed ten or even five years ago, and that none of the speakers we listened to in college could possibly compete with them-except, perhaps, the Smaller Advent. Still, he agreed that the affordable speakers he's heard at my house have steadily improved in quality over the past 15 years. Although he loves music, and is a talented designer at chip maker Analog Devices, Larry is not an audiophile. (These were the higher-cost model, with the sexy real-wood cabinets.) I was floored by how well and effortlessly these speakers filled the banquet hall with clean, distortion-free sound.Īs Larry and I talked about speakers, our attention shifted to more current designs. I attended one of my brothers' wedding receptions (he's still happily married 32 years later), for which another brother had donated his original 'Large' Advents for DJ duty.

I'd always favored the Advent camp, and not just because they seemed to play the most interesting music-their systems always sounded the most natural and uncolored. I never had enough cash to buy my own hi-fi until well after graduate school, so I freeloaded off my brothers' systems. But it was full of music lovers who fell neatly into three camps: the California School owned JBL Decades, the New England School had Smaller Advents, and the Renegades boasted bootlegged Bose 901s (footnote 1). Ours was not a jock house, nor was it the last bastion of rampant male sexuality-it was, after all, an MIT frat house. Strong friendships were formed, and ever since, we've kept in touch with most of our fraternity's brothers-in-heart. Those were four of the best years of my life. One day last year, my friend Larry and I were talking about our college-fraternity days and loudspeakers.

Advent large speakers specs