Tremendous value. Great sound. Great build quality.

Lack of name recognition. Made in China

I needed a new center but did not have a lot of money. I knew Advent had quite the history but had not made anything of note for quite some time. Recoton pretty much ran what was left inot the ground. My goal was to get the best speaker I could for the least amount of money. At the price I paid with free shipping, I decided to take a risk and see what happened. Just about anything had to be better than the old Sony center I was using.
At this price do not pass this up. It is an incredible value. The speaker is extremely well constructed with excellent fit and finish. The cabinet is made of 5/8" MDF and is ported in the rear. It uses gold-plated binding posts and the cabinet is internally braced and it has sufficient fill material. This is not the cheap construction of a KLH or Sony. This is well-built. The sound is very good, with amazing bass response for its size. That 55-30K htz rating is not a misprint. Its taken a good 15 hours or more of break-in to really start shining though.
The Audiovox/Advent website is totally worthless if you are looking for information on this speaker and that is a shame given how nice of a product this is. I decided to do some research on this entire series of speakers which in a nod to its past Advent has called the Heritage H series. What I found out actually reinforces what a great buy this is. It turns out that this speaker is actually a relable of one of Audiovox's German subsidiaries called HECO. HECO engineered and designed the entire series and markets them in Europe as the Krypton series. It seems that after Audiovox acquired Advent from Recoton and made the decision to try to bring back the brand for speakers, they felt it was easier to just use an already designed, successful product from one of its German acquisitions that currently did not have a presence in the US market.
HECO, it turns out, is a respectable brand in Germany. Throughout Europe their pricing and products are in direct competition with brands such as Mordaunt-Short, Mission, Wharfedale, and Boston Acoustic. That is the level of quality you can expect from this speaker. Here is the link for HECO's website: http://www.heco-audio.de/EN/home/index.asp
While, this is German designed and engineered, I have to admit that HECO has followed the route of many manufacturers and sub-contracted out its construction to China. But his is still not some piece of junk Chinese speakers and you can tell as soon as you take it out of the box.Out of curiousity I did some checking to see what the price of the HECO branded model of this speaker was in Europe. Street pricing ran about 100-150 Euros. In dollars that would put it in the same price range as the JBl EC25, Infinity C25, Athena C.5, and the Polk CS1. When you can pick this up for $70 or less at most places in the US, its quite the steal.