What Our Experts Think About The Avalon Precision Monitor 1
Avalon’s latest speaker design, the PM1 recently arrived here at studioAV. The PM1 ,or the Precision Monitor 1 features some of Avalon’s top of the range specification, filtering technology down from the prestigious Avalon Tesseract.
Visually, the Precision Monitor 1 very much represents the Avalon style, with those unmistakable lines. The cabinets are, however noticeably lighter for the size than previous designs. This is due to a change from the more conventional cabinet construction to Avalon’s new proprietary silent inert cabinet design.
Now all this sounds impressive, but how do they sound? After giving them a good few hundred hours of running in, we hooked them up to a Melco/MSB/Burmester system, cabled throughout with Tellurium Q Statement Cables and settled in for an afternoon’s listening. Immediately the Avalon sonic signature shone through; natural open, textured and involving, but compared to previous designs in a more compact cabinet, a more open dynamic sound was immediately apparent. Bass is powerful, deep and extremely agile, distinctly lacking cabinet colouration. Midrange is open, three dimensional and clean, but by no means analytical, lending real emotion and a tangible presence to vocals.
Listening to one of the usual numbers – Norah Jones’ Don’t know why – the usual space is present in the recording, however when the vocal hits the high notes a lot of systems wander into the realms of harshness. This system however has no such problem, but this is by no means at the expense of dynamic headroom and drive. Moving on to Ace of Bases’ Whispers in Blindness, you are immediately taken by the powerful deep, controlled bass that is completely free of the cabinets, and again vocals hang in space with a real and natural tonality. As the track builds up layers of instrumentation are easily followed, but again gel together in a brilliantly natural way, giving an amazing coherence to the presentation. Moving to classical, Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight not only displayed incredible scale and size of stage for a middle sized cabinet, but dynamics and depth that certainly belies the cabinet size. I could go on….
To conclude, these speakers are typically Avalon in presentation and musicality, with some extra real world vibrancy and a definite holographic presence to the soundstage in width and front to back depth. But why just take my word for it, come and have a listen for yourself in our demonstration lounge!
