A life mission in music
by Poul Rossing, founder

I have been asked to share a few thoughts about why I’d spend almost a whole lifetime trying to make better and better speakers available to more and more people around the world.

I suppose it must have started in my childhood. I was born into a family that took a passionate interest in music.

My father was an engineer, so I inherited an enthusiasm for both music and technology from him. He ran a radio shop with a laboratory in the back, which for a boy 10 to 12 years old was a wonderful place to spend spare time.

I started making loudspeakers and amplifiers with my father. At the same time, I would go to concerts with him to listen to classical and jazz music. There was nothing like the sound of live music. So when we got back to the shop the following day, we’d spend all our time modifying our speakers trying to re-create the sound we heard in the concert hall.

When I was 16, I joined a jazz band as a drummer. I was lucky enough to play with many great musicians, and my passion for music continued to grow stronger. This experience also trained my ear to tell the difference between good and bad sound, an invaluable skill for my future as a speaker designer.

Later, I became the general Danish distributor of famous Hi Fi brands like Luxman, Alpine, B&W, just to mention a few. But my "hobby" and real joy in life remained focused on designing loudspeakers myself.

It got to the point where my preoccupation evolved into my life’s central occupation. That was the start of Avance International Ltd. I built Avance up with a simple idea.

As a musician and engineer, I wanted to make speakers capable of reproducing music as close to a live performance as possible, and to do so at the most affordable price possible so a wider audience of public of music lovers could enjoy them.

Today, I am pretty satisfied with the way things have turned out because I think I have succeeded.

Avance speakers have been named, "best-in-class," and "best-buy" in leading audio magazines through the world, which was exactly the aim of my design philosophy.

I still consider price to be an important specification of a speaker.

I really recommend that you do the same.

Thoughts about quality
Maybe it would help to think about a speaker designer as a chef in a restaurant. If he used frozen meat and vegetables, he’ll make a boring meal, no matter how talented he might be.

The quality of your raw materials means everything.

The same is true when it comes to making speakers.

If you use second quality components, you’ll produce second quality speakers and sound.

That’s why we are obsessed about the components we use in our speakers. In fact, we enjoy the challenges posed by developing and testing.

Our speakers, unlike those mass-produced by machine, are still made mostly be human hands and ears. Here, crafting speakers remains essentially as art form.

So we still spend a lot more time testing and listening to each model than other manufacturers. Our judgment as individual people still determines the quality of each and every speaker that leaves our doors. Sure, we use the most sophisticated technical tests available, but in the final analysis, it’s still a labour of love.

Being located in Denmark helps, too. Denmark is home to some of the world’s best driver and cabinetmakers. We work directly with them and never buy off the shelf solutions. Instead, we work together to customer performance-setting components to our specification.

And because our alliance with our suppliers, who share our passion for quality, is so strong, we don’t need to use middlemen. We pass the savings onto customers by offering them the best prices possible. Other speakers may cost less, I can promise you this:

Our business principles

Awards