Does Avalon speakers have a house sound?

They have contracted over the last several years, more than many companies over the same period, they may have to change what they do a bit.

They absolutely have a house sound, I've listened to easily 75 setups over the last 20 years. The sound is detailed (above average to very detailed depending on model), open, very focused, spacious. The negative for many, including me, is that they are typically lean (this is not room-related, or system-related, it is positively a trait) and can strike many folks as fatiguing. They fatigue me in a way that live chamber, symphonic, jazz, blues do not. This is why I don't use them.

Beautifully built.

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.

Let's remember that detail alone is a dangerous thing to judge by: just hook up a tweeter used in your favorite speaker and compare the detail of the tweeter to the entire speaker. Immense detail. Mostly due to the lack of other lower frequency sounds to mask that detail.

Or, use an eq and give a rise above 6k. Again, loads of detail. But, only due to an exaggeration of frequency response. Learning how to use an eq would teach a lot of audiophiles why many speakers sound the way they do.

My last post sounds like Avalon bashing, it's not, they are better than most speakers available.