AVI Sound International
Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, AVI was established in 1989 to manufacture high quality loudspeaker drivers. The initial AVI products, all designed by chief engineer Howard Doctor, were high performance subwoofers for car audio applications. With computer modeling of driver behaviour still in its infancy, his team built many prototypes over several months, re-testing and improving each generation. The drivers were remarkably advanced, and many features that AVI introduced to car audio have since been adopted by others, including vented cast alloy chassis, integral heat exchangers, HX composite cones, ribbon wire and polyimide-glass composite voice coils.
Innovations
AVI's MX-90 was the world's first midrange to employ a neodymium (NdFeB) magnet, and AVI also created the first 24 dB crossovers (XN-24E), and the first point source coaxial speakers (CS-130) in automotive audio. Among other notable innovations was an extraordinarily thin, dual magnet, dual voice coil subwoofer (SL-500) that performed remarkably well in exceptionally small enclosures. AVI Sound International is privately held, and the products continue to be hand-built in Vancouver and the list of IASCA sound-quality competition winners using AVI speakers runs into the hundreds.
In 2008, AVI introduced professional speaker systems, designed for 'high output hi-fi' applications. Also new at that time were a family of line-source systems based on their proprietary 130mm wide-range driver. All alloy enclosures create good sounding, inconspicuous and rugged speakers with 1, 2, or 3 active drivers. These drivers employ unusual treated paper LF cones with damped-roll textile suspensions, and resin impregnated HF cone/dome radiators, driven by low mass voice coils in narrow gaps, using TDK magnets.