I have the Trio's with a Solo Center at the moment and I think they sound very good together.
1. I don't have the luxury of a separate room for theater.
2. The only one that really cares about perfect acoustics in our house is me, and therefore the main listening position matters most to me. Everyone else seems to do just fine a bit off axis.
3 Our line of 5 theater seats is about 15 feet from the speakers with the Trios spread apart all the way to the corners of our 18 foot room screen-wall.
The acoustics for off axis in a movie setting is not nearly as bad as folks seem to be worried about around here.
With at least a 50 degree dispersion, the speakers reach my seating positions just fine.
The Solo is a decent center channel speaker (which is all I can fit in my setup).
The Solo is not really that closely designed to anything else in the Avantgarde lineup. I think the worry that other speakers would not "match" as a center is widely overblown. I think this depends on how obsessive you wish to be.
I am about to order a Danley Soundlabs SM96 to try out in my system as a replacement for the Solo to match the size of the trios image. There is no reason to believe that a high dynamic range horn loaded speaker won't sound VERY similar to Avantgarde's. There is a thread out there by a guy that owns a Danley setup and actually prefers it to the Avantgarde Trios. I don't think audio fidelity will be an issue with Danley speakers.
If that works out, I will likely sell the Akoya Pearl Solo that I have. It is really hard to find one of these... so if you are interested just message me back. The Solo's imaging "size" will much more closely match the Uno's or even the Duo's (which I also owned recently). I will keep you in mind over the next few weeks and message you if I no longer need the solo.
I will likely sell this unit for $3000 on audiogon in the next month if the Danley works well in my system better.
1. I don't have the luxury of a separate room for theater.
2. The only one that really cares about perfect acoustics in our house is me, and therefore the main listening position matters most to me. Everyone else seems to do just fine a bit off axis.
3 Our line of 5 theater seats is about 15 feet from the speakers with the Trios spread apart all the way to the corners of our 18 foot room screen-wall.
The acoustics for off axis in a movie setting is not nearly as bad as folks seem to be worried about around here.
With at least a 50 degree dispersion, the speakers reach my seating positions just fine.
The Solo is a decent center channel speaker (which is all I can fit in my setup).
The Solo is not really that closely designed to anything else in the Avantgarde lineup. I think the worry that other speakers would not "match" as a center is widely overblown. I think this depends on how obsessive you wish to be.
I am about to order a Danley Soundlabs SM96 to try out in my system as a replacement for the Solo to match the size of the trios image. There is no reason to believe that a high dynamic range horn loaded speaker won't sound VERY similar to Avantgarde's. There is a thread out there by a guy that owns a Danley setup and actually prefers it to the Avantgarde Trios. I don't think audio fidelity will be an issue with Danley speakers.
If that works out, I will likely sell the Akoya Pearl Solo that I have. It is really hard to find one of these... so if you are interested just message me back. The Solo's imaging "size" will much more closely match the Uno's or even the Duo's (which I also owned recently). I will keep you in mind over the next few weeks and message you if I no longer need the solo.
I will likely sell this unit for $3000 on audiogon in the next month if the Danley works well in my system better.