Customer Reviews

Advent AW870 Wireless Powered Speakers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I've been using my Advent wireless speakers for about 2 months, and am very pleased with their overall performance. I will likely buy another pair. I use them for rear speakers in my surround sound setup, so I don't have to run wires around the room. Also, I take speakers to other parts of the house, or out on the patio when listening to CDs or FM and can't be in the main listening room. Reception and sound quality is good, only rare interference noise when someone passes near speaker.

I bought these in the hopes of using them both in my home office and for picnics--just bring along a walkman, plug it in, instant outdoor concert.

Well, not quite. Although the speakers can be battery-powered (requiring 8 C-cells each), the transmitter cannot be, unless you are adventurous enough to splice a power jack into the power cord and build a suitable battery pack on your own time.

I found the sound from the speakers to be OK but nothing special. I often thought there was some barely perceptible fuzz. Tuning has not been a set-and-forget affair: people moving nearby can knock the signal out. And 900 MHz cordless phones produce really bad interference.

The industrial design on these is pretty stupid, with the battery hatches actually screwed in place--making them very inconvenient if you plan on running them on battery power with any regularity. They would also benefit from more smarts, so that you only needed to set one volume knob (instead of three) and with automatic frequency hunting (my phone can do it, why not the speakers?). This would all drive up the cost, but it would be worth it.

I'd recommend these for people who want a set of speakers they can haul out on the deck once in a while for barbecues and as a remote set of speakers for the bedroom or office, or for situations where it would be really inconvenient to run a speaker wire (but you'll still need a power outlet nearby, really).

I have just installed a pair of these speakers. Setup is relatively simple, although I had to use my headphone jack to create the connection. As one would imagine, the high end is better than the bass reproduction. All in all, I am pleased. The position of the speakers is about 50 feet from the source. Monster cable alone would be over half the price, as I would have had to drill through the floor, crawl under 2 sets of icky tight spaces to pull the cable, etc., etc. My time and money would have broke even with the cost of the units BEFORE even tackling the question of which bookshelf speakers to buy. If sound is a priority and you can live with a compromise with high fidelity, these are for you.

I recently purchased the Advent AW870 Wireless Powered Speakers and found them to be very difficult to tune properly. The signal would drift in and out with alot of distortion. Then I picked up RCAs (WSP200) new wireless speakers with their transmitter and speakers having 3 preset 900 MHz channels. This was a snap to get up and running and worked great. I was even able to tune the advent speakers to the RCA tranmitter very quickly. I came to the conclusion that the Advent transmitter is much more difficult to use and I would not recommend the Advent series because of the transmitter.

I just purchased a set of the Advent 870's with the hope that this will allow me to have speakers in another room of the house without the hassle of wiring. Well . . . when I tried to place them in another room, the sound quality was terrible. The hiss from the speakers was louder than my old cordless phone and the music signal often broke up. This despite attempts to adjust the frequency and placement. All this occured when they were only 40 feet from the transmitter (albeit through two rooms), they only worked reasonably well within 20 feet of the transmitter. The claim of a 300 foot range is clearly ridiculous in the real world. Less than a day after receiving them my wife and I agreed that they weren't worth it. I would only recommend them to someone who plans to use them in the same room as the transmitter (or really close to it), otherwise the poor sound quality far outweighs the convenience that wireless theroretically offers.

I bought these with some trepidation due to the wide variation in ratings found here. They worked great in my house. The tuner is in my basement and now I can listen to music in my living room which is one floor up and about 25-30 diagonal feet from the tuner. I tried them in my back porch which is another 20 feet away and they worked fine there too. Tuning for me took less than 3 minutes. The only negative is I had to use my headphone jack which worked out fine but when using this jack you have to carefully turn the tuner's volume dial until the wireless transmitter's light starts blinking intermittently (for best signal to speakers). On my tuner the dial works best a fairly low volume on the tuner volume knob so if I want to keep the main wired speakers on it has to stay at that volume. You CAN turn the wireless's volume up as loud as you want.

These speakers serve their purpose well as convenient and portable. I haven't had any of the sound problems that the other reviewers have mentioned, no popping or static. If you follow Advent's enclosed instruction manual, adjusting the frequency was pretty straightforward. I have actually been quite surprised by their sound quality, I was expecting less. Nice bass, and certainly loud enough. I can recommend these speakers without hesitation.

The wireless speakers work well, with much greater sound quality then I expected. The only issue is that it took some time to adjust the speakers and transmitters to the right frequency (the one with the highest quality of sound that didn't interfer with the 900 MHz phone) but once that was accomplished everything has been working perfectly. An hours worth of hassle doesn't seem too bad for a long term solution.

The speakers are supposed to work up to 300 feet away. I have the receiver in my dining room and tried putting the speakers in my bedroom (maybe 50 feet away). The static was so bad I had to take them out. This was going through several walls. I have placed the speakers closer to the receiver and they sound just OK. I think it would be better to have some nice wired speakers with very long cable. It would sound a lot better.

After searching this section and reading the reviews of this product, I finally thought I had a 900 mhz speaker set that would work. So I ordered it. Big disappointment. It seems to work fine within about a 10 foot radius of the small signal station, but beyond that reception is sketchy at best--not even as good as my 900 mhz phone, oddly. In particular, the system seems to have problems when the speakers are not in line-of-sight contact. So while this may be an okay system to create "surround sound" near your TV, it's really not powerful enough to use as a way to carry signals from your stereo into other rooms.