Does Avalon speakers have a house sound?

Hi Bo, I think used Avalon owners all over the world would be interested in the serial number of that pair might be :)
Scary cos there is no way you can access the crossovers without major hacking (literally). Scary.
I do agree with you that violins are the Avalons' trouble spot. More so with the models using the Acuton ceramic mid than the old Ascents and Eclipses.
But heck they sound good overall with a host of other material. The lean and fatiguing sound can be minimized with triodes triodes and triodes everywhere... Cables with chokes in the mystery network boxes help a bit too but at the expense of resolution.

It was one of the most unique persons I met in audio. He stripped even a pair of Nautilus 802 speakers and made an external filterbox for it. The results were stunning. A friend of mine had the Avalon Eclipse improved version. He also plays with the Platinum PL-200 of Monitor Audio now. It blow away the Avalon speakers in every aspect. This speaker also has a deep and wide stage same as the Avalon's. But instruments and voices are within this square so much more palpable. Like in real. A friend of mine also plays with Avalon and has many parts the same as I have. Compared to the Pl-200 it is less touchable. Timing of the Pl-200 is superior to all the Avalon speakers I heard.

Extracting the crossover of a JBL or B&W or better yet Focal Utopia is completely different from trying to take out anything from an Avalon. I wonder how much sawing he did to take out the crossover and how much glueing and sanding to put it back. I figure he has since sold the Diamonds, and wonder if the new owner knows there's been something done to them.

It was difficult to glue it back he said. He did not saw anything.

I don't even want to THINK about how a violin would sound on them.

A friend of mine with the biggest best ones played a bunch of jazz on them, including trumpet works. My ears rang for 3 days. Like violin, trumpet has a very difficult set of overtones to reproduce. Most speakers cannot capture both the "drive" and tone without adding loads of ear-splitting distortion.

Sorry, but coloring up speakers with cables and amps adds distortion (as pleasing as it may be) which heavily masks true detail. Might be listenable, but I prefer real low distortion sound to convince me I might be at a performance, not tonally pleasing mush that has had the life sucked out of it.