Advent Large Loudspeaker

Descrizione

#2 on The Top Ten Most Influential Speakers of all time!

by Audioholics Magazine

No. 2: The Advents

Henry Kloss was quite the figure in the American speaker business in the 1950s–1960s. After he left KLH, he went on to found Advent Corporation because he wanted to manufacture and market large-screen two-piece television projection systems. In order to produce the cash flow needed for that undertaking, however, he decided to make and sell speakers under the Advent name. This virtual “afterthought” went on to become perhaps the most successful speaker brand of the early-mid 1970s, during the very height of the huge Baby Boom generation college population explosion.

With typical Kloss directness of purpose, he came out with just two models, simply called the Advent Loudspeaker and the Smaller Advent Loudspeaker. Both were 10” 2-way sealed speakers, using in-house designed and built drivers. They differed mainly in size (the “Large” Advent was a full-sized bookshelf speaker, like the AR-3 or KLH Five); the Smaller Advent was a bit larger and more expensive than the AR-4x, but still much trimmer than the larger Advent. Kloss took the “dealer-as-partner” marketing strategy that he initiated when he was at KLH (he was the “K”) to new heights with Advent. Advent dealers presented and sold their speakers with an almost fanatical, religious zeal. The Advents themselves were certainly worthy of their success, great-sounding speakers that had extraordinary bass response—especially considering their modest price—and represented terrific performance-to-price values. The Advents could be said to have spearheaded the explosion of stereo’s popular jump from the hobbyist-only market of the middle-aged “GE engineer living in Suburbia” during the mid-1960s to the 10-fold market increase of the Baby Boomer college kid/dorm room experience of the 1970s.

Advent speakers mainstreamed stereo to the masses.

As a bonus to the amazing role Advent played in transforming stereo from a 1960s Dad-only hobby to its 1970s mainstream popularity, somehow the idea of two speakers per channel “stacked Large Advents” as a tower, driven as if they were one speaker—achieved legendary audiophile status in the 1970s as well. All the high-end magazines accorded Stacked Advents some kind of mythical quality that couldn’t be explained by “the numbers” or even by Advent’s design personnel. This only added to the Advent lore of the 1970s, a brand reputation and story exceeded by few, if any, products in any field.