History of Avanti Audio and how we got here

History and how we got here

As an avid Hi-Fi enthusiast for the past 30 years, I like so many others involved in this passion came to realize that it's difficult to purchase the fanciest of Hi-Fi designs, prettiest of cosmetics and newest technology....and still afford to eat or pay the bills. I very much appreciate high quality music reproduction and always have since my introduction to higher end audio gear many years ago. Since that time, I've had to find ways to fuel my passion on a budget. 

Over the past 15 or so years, I've been fortunate enough to have assembled two very high quality and revealing audio systems that I listen to daily. When it came time to purchase audio interconnects, power and speaker cables for these systems such that I might realize their fullest potential, I was shocked at the prices most of the well-known interconnect and speaker cable manufacturers were charging for their products. Ultimately, I decided to design and build my own cables as a means to my goal of owning and using very high-quality audio cables on my limited budget. When I was impressed with the results of my work, I began sharing my wares with others in the hobby and they too were equally impressed and suggested that I should supply them to a bigger audience. In 2010 I made a push to make my products official and the Avanti Audio cable company was born.

After a year and a half of research starting in early 2009, the hunt for a qualified line of cabling and connectors landed us on our Allegro line of Audio Cables. Not only did we search out and try many different brands and geometries of the wire conductors themselves, we played with various engineering guidelines of grounding and filtering methods too. The end result was a series of Unbalanced RCA Interconnects, Balanced XLR Interconnects, high-end Power Cables and affordable audiophile Speaker Cables that complemented each other with matching sound profiles that are even-handed and transparent with wonderful extension throughout the frequency spectrum. They are neutral to slightly warm in character; are detailed but without top end fatigue and reproduce accurate lower registers with ease. There’s a reason that we continue to build the Allegro lineup of cables eleven years later…they simply do many things right.

2020 was strange but gave birth to something new

It’s no doubt that 2020 brought the world new challenges and changes, not the least of which was an impact to all of our lifestyles and choices for entertainment and leisure time. Over the course of 2020 Avanti Audio stayed pretty busy while people were stuck at home with their stereo systems as an important source of entertainment and relaxation. It seems that audiophiles decided that if they were going to be home for extended periods of time, they might as well focus on good sound too! During this time, we received lots of feedback on our Audio Cables from customers new and old. Something we’ve heard from customers over the years and again in 2020 was a want for “a more audiophile sounding cable”. So, while we ourselves were hunkered down in 2020, we decided to explore different designs to create this thing called “a more audiophile sounding cable”.

Our customers that have purchased our long running Allegro line of audio cables are generally always fully satisfied with the products and appreciate the sonic characteristics that the lineup delivers. The Allegro cables were all designed with a primary focus of “do no harm” being an even-handed sound signature top to bottom. This means having a non-aggressive top end for the high frequencies, a smooth mid-range presentation and a solid but not flabby bottom end bass signature. The Allegro cables are the type that will satisfy most everyone, will match with most all equipment and offend very few ears…but, they could also be defined as not terribly exciting for some listeners that are used to a more expressive sound. This, the somewhat opposite definition of “audiophile sounding”. Primarily, listeners that prefer a little more of a 5^th-10^th row presentation to their music, a bit more exciting dynamics and are detail-seekers could be slightly disappointed with our Allegro cables as they deliver more of a relaxed and even-handed presentation. Enter our next evolution of audio cables, the Vivace cable series!

Vivace [vi-vah-chey] (adverb, adjective) - in a lively or vivacious manner; quicker than allegro

We developed our new Vivace line of cables to address the wants and needs of users for “a more audiophile sounding cable”. As mentioned above, if a listener is seeking a closer-to-the-stage presentation to their music, wants to experience jump out of your seat dynamics and demands hearing all the detail that their system is able to reproduce, then Vivace is your best bet for musical satisfaction. Vivace is the new Reference Level series of audio cables from Avanti Audio.

Currently, our Vivace Reference Level audio cable line consists of High-End Speaker Cables, Balanced XLR Interconnect Cables, Unbalanced RCA Interconnect Cables, and Audiophile CAT7 Ethernet Cables. In addition to new cable designs and specifications for each application, each build utilizes only genuine top of the line connectors from WBT-Germany, Telegartner-Germany and Furutech-Japan.

If you’re looking for an exciting, dynamic, fast and highly accurate audio cable for your audio gear connectivity needs, we hope you’ll give our new Vivace Audio Cables a good look and honorable placement into your treasured sound system. Your audio equipment investment deserves the finest interconnection cables available and Vivace is here to provide that link.

Additional information we'd like to share

Avanti Audio is backed by 75+ combined years of electronic engineering design and electronic assembly experience & expertise. This depth of experience is spread between myself and my now retired father who spent his entire working career as an Electronics P.E. Between my father and I, we have designed all of the Avanti Audio cable assemblies together, including our custom Cable Conditioner appliance. All audio cable assemblies (IC's, Speaker cables, Power cables, Digital cables, custom requests, etc.) are assembled & soldered by me (Mike) in Avon, CO USA. Soldered connections are assembled with Cardas Quad Eutectic solder exclusively. All audio cable assemblies that I manufacture follow tried and true and often times unique engineering principles for termination, grounding schemas and in some cases filtering technologies that are found in other brands' products priced many times over and above what the Avanti Audio Allegro and Vivace cable line's cost. This added technology design is provided as "standard build" with all Avanti Audio cable products.

The Avanti Audio cables are almost all built from ultra-fine strand, high purity (five or six nines) oxygen free copper (OFC) conductors utilizing various geometries and stranding properties to optimize signal transmission. The exceptions to using stranded OFC-only conductors in our designs are our Allegro 75ohm SPDIF Digital Cables that use a high purity copper solid conductor and our Allegro Power Cables that use high purity fine strand OFC copper conductors with silver plating. In general, we feel that OFC copper conductors match a great number of electronic gear and speaker types and provide a rich sonic experience without driving the price upward beyond affordable for many listeners.

The connector sets that we’ve selected for both Allegro and Vivace cable lines are of very high to extremely high quality; are all genuine OEM connectors and come from manufacturers such as WBT, Furutech, ViaBlue, Wattgate, Neutrik and Belden. All are selected for their outstanding sonic performance, endurance and fit & finish compared to others. Most any Furutech, Wattgate or WBT connectors may be ordered if a customer wants a model different than our standard offerings.

We invite you to try any of our Avanti Audio Cables risk free for 30 days in your system. If you're not totally satisfied with their build and sound quality, just return them in the same condition you received them for a full refund (less shipping charges).

Happy listening & thank you for visiting Avanti Audio!


Best Regards,

Mike Chadwell
Avanti Audio

~~~~~~~

Just for fun, I thought I'd share some photos that my dad recently sent me of the Heathkit HW-8 Ham Radio Transceiver that I built for his dad (my grandfather) back in 1977. I was ten years old when I built this kit. My dad had this unit in his storage since my grandfather's passing in the late 1980's and he recently found it a new home. He took these pictures when he was testing the unit out before gifting it on. These pics brought back a flood of memories...sitting on a stack of phone books while working at my dad's bench after school with a soldering iron in hand. Yep, been nerdy from the start.