These are the only posts I've seen speaking against Avatar but they were strident enough to give me pause at the time:
Don't buy a new Avatar bigger than a 1x12. I've owned 1x12s, a 2x12, and a 4x12 and despite my best efforts to convince myself otherwise, they are not really very good cabs (even at that price) except for the 1x12s. Every Avatar I have tried doesn't handle high volume and appears to be made of whatever was on special at Home Depot that week. The ONLY thing in favor of buying a new Avatar is if for some reason you absolutely need a specific color combination (I dunno, maybe you're in a Prince cover band) and you need it soon.
If you are very short of cash and have no prospects of getting more, a used Avatar is a good buy only because they go so cheap used. Seriously, if you have been playing through a not-good (Avatar, Peavey, low-end Marshall) cab, the first time you play through a good one (Mesa, Orange, Bogner, Mills) you will be so pissed at all the time you have wasted.
I asked him to go into more detail since the first post really didn't say anything quantitative. Here's how he responded:
I have owned four, count them four, Avatar cabs, two 1x12 Traditionals that I initially bought new because I was putting together a stereo rig in a hurry.
I liked them and so I got a used 2x12 Traditional, and a used 4x12 Modern. Oops. The 1x12s I ordered with a CL80 and a Eminence V12 but they are good with any speakers, there's only so much you can do right or wrong with a non-ported 1x12. They decided to go with front-mounted speakers so that the rest of the cab is more solid, which is fair. I still own one of them, it's a perfectly good 1x12.
The 2x12 and 4x12 lose a lot of definition in the bass at higher volumes, even with super-tight EVM12s. I tried a bunch of different speakers (V30s, CL80s, Eminence V12s, EVMs) in these cabs, I went through a speaker phase for a while. The 2x12 pretty much just turns into a fuzzy-yet-blaring mess with any speakers once you're up to drummer volume. The 4x12 lost both highs and lows at any volume where you'd want to use a 4x12.
The only good thing I can say about either of them is that they were pretty lively at lower volumes and had nice spread.
When I opened them up to do speaker swaps I could see that both the 4x12 and the 2x12 had been built with just regular-quality plywood like you'd slap down for a subfloor; there were so many voids in the backplate of the 2x12 that one corner had actually gotten kind of crushed just from someone else taking it off before, and there were surface voids visible inside the 4x12. The tolex was really well applied, and the overall fit and finish was good, they were clearly just trying to cut costs on materials. The 1x12s were built of much higher quality wood.
I think people want to like Avatar because they're US-made, were initially really, really cheap, and you have lots of cosmetic options. A lot of people buy Avatar as their first NEW cab ever, and really want to like it for that too. They're not terrible cabs, but they're not any better than anything else that's comparably priced new and in most cases you'd be better off buying a higher-quality used cab.
YMMV of course...
