Breaking news - new Trio G3 with iTron amplification . No more problem with external amps, fully active speakers with built-in amplifiers.
This is some great news! Matthias Ruff told me at the club meeting at Avantgarde factory in November 2019 about these new versions they were working on. (I had to keep this to myself, as it was deeply secret )
I think tube (or very good ss) is the best way to drive AA, but very curious how the G3 will sound.
Matthias also told me, why they started building their own amps. They started distribution in Asia (Taiwan or South Korea, I can't remember) and were selling very very well. But they were contacted by customers that the speakers were not sounding very good.
Actually the dealers had close contracts to the distributors, so they combined AA with electronics from these distributors who were selling not this high quality products.
So the easiest way for Avantgarde Acoustic was to sell their own amps and because of reliability of SS being better and AA being a small company not able to do service overseas.
I did hear a lot of AA with their own amps and I liked them. I think they actually sound better with very good Tubes.
My Uno (2004) sounded great with Unison Research, MC Intosh MC7300 (never ever a hint of sharpness), but I travelled to very high spheres with the KR Audio VA 350 purity....