Avantgarde Acoustic Colibri C2 stand-mount loudspeaker

By: Eric van Spelde [hi-fi+ Issue 236]

The Colibri C2 is not a direction change for Avantgarde Acoustic. It’s an ‘adding more strings to the bow’ loudspeaker concept. It’s a recognition that the audio world is changing at a fundamental level. While the company’s more regular output of very large, very distinctive horn loudspeakers will likely always be a function of the German brand, the Colibri C2 is aimed at a wholly new audience; one more used to a more connected world. An audience who might not even know of Avantgarde Acoustic.

Perhaps the most prominent member of the German horn loudspeaker gang (please, no jokes about oompah bands) that rose to notoriety in the latter decades of the 20th century, Avantgarde Acoustic, operating from the darkest depths of the Odenwald (about threequarters of an hour drive away from Frankfurt Airport), has always danced to a slightly different drum than the majority of ultra high-end manufacturers. Avantgarde’s classic series of semi-active (and latterly fully active, too) horn systems consisting of variations on the Uno, Duo and Trio themes has been honed to near-perfection. Beginning as awed-genius origins, over three decades worth of development, Avantgarde was never about the usual audiophile bean counting. And it was never about A-B-X comparing, ‘can you hear the coughing of a middleaged female on the third row, seven seats from the left’ pastimes favoured by an ever smaller niche of, let’s face it, predominantly older white males. They’re simply about recreating the thrill and emotional impact of music events.

Life-like dynamics

According to Avantgarde’s founder and CEO, Holger Fromme, the key to realising this is offering life-like dynamics. “Take your average hi-­ loudspeaker that can go to maybe 100dB in a room with a lot of ampli­er power behind it. At 90dB, it will already display noticeable dynamic compression,” says Fromme. “Much of the impact will be gone, especially with many modern, often electronic music styles.” Therefore, Avantgarde’s speakers offer minimal crossovers, sensitivity ratings well into three ­gures with powerful drivers working tiny moving masses being coupled to the ambient air as ef­ciently as possible through those vast, colourful, injection moulded ABS spherical wave horns, supported in the lowfrequency department by very powerful, DSP-controlled amps and large drivers, front-loaded with horn-like wave guides or even honest-to-God horns in the most extensive and expensive models. ‘Spendy’ speakers are great if you’ve got a high ­ve-­gure sum (or more) to spend on a hi-fi­ – in which case you might well be a member of the above demographic. However, top-end audio sales are becoming an industry-wide problem as Baby Boomers are getting to an age where they’d sooner divest from their earthly possessions than buy (even more) expensive new gear.

Enter Colibri. We have seen ‘entrylevel’ speakers from Avantgarde before, from the Solo of the early 2000s to the all-digital Zero One and its semi-active, analogue input spin-off Zero TA. Although they were admirable efforts, neither quite captured the magic of the core line, and the Zero/Zero One were still ­ve ­gures, anyway. Avantgarde ­rst demonstrated a ‘concept car’ version of Colibri at the Munich High End 2023, and it was aimed at a very different audience – the sort of people that scoff at the thought of buying a £400 cable because they can buy a pair of stunning headphones to use with their smartphone as a primary source for less than that, and for music in the home would spend maybe €2,000-€3,000 at German direct sellers Teufel (which has stores at any larger cities’ high streets there) or Nubert. “At €7,000 for the speakers plus the cost of a decent subwoofer to go with them, the Colibri is still a very expensive loudspeaker for many people. Therefore, what we offer them should be extremely compelling, and we believe it is. For the ­rst time in history, everybody has the means to play music with full bandwidth and uninhibited dynamic range in their back pocket. Any smartphone today has enough calculating power not to need data reduction formats like MP3 anymore, and streaming platforms have been migrating to high-resolution ­les. The music source is not the bottleneck anymore; it’s the transducer. Now I’ve just bought a pair of headphones for 150 euros, and the sound quality is out of this world for that price.