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Your thoughts about ATC loudspeakers

I’m interested in the ATC SCM-40 from their HiFi series and would like to hear from people who have owned or spent a lot of time with ATC speakers. This is a fairly new model and may be a bit of a departure from their classic sound.

At the show in Newport last weekend, I was quite taken by these speakers. I went back the next day and heard the same things that I liked about them, but a couple of red flags also went up:

Microdynamics – not sure these speakers do them well and microdynamics are critical to communicating inflection and nuance and to making music sound alive

Imaging, specifically wrt depth. Nothing much outside of the plane of the speakers, so recording venue info is not there and even instrument and vocal body may suffer a bit.

Were these shortcomings of setup or associated gear, or is this what ATC does?
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shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,467 posts
 
@audiotroy 

The Quested and PMC don't quite have the level of detail of the ATC mid but for listening they both sound great. They also have more bass than ATC but again not quite as precise and tight as ATC. I think dragon_vibe finds the less clinical presentation to be more pleasant and less fatiguing. All three speakers are very good. All three have their fan base.
dragon_vibe
430 posts
 
Yes this is what I felt about both speakers, overall on the matters of bass I still liked the Quested, for mids I still like the Quested again. The Biggest Point was Quested worked with Tube Amplifiers and the mids was more holographic and lucid with Tubes amps in the mix.

I can easily swap out different Amps, With the ATC I was stuck with Solid States only. So Pick your poison as no speaker is perfect!

ATC transmission line bass seemed slightly! lacking to me, it was tighter/faster but lacking to some sense it would NOT fill in the bottom end properly on certain musical genres only.

The Quested by comparison just felt a little more satisfying, but did not have that last ounce of definition that the ATC produced.

The Quested would fill in the bottom end better and give a better low level energy at the cost of losing some definition. This overall for me worked out better as I don’t sit around listening to audiophile recordings.

I would give the ATC mids a slight nod to details as comparison to Quested or PMC. I wish I could have tried the Tubes on ATC this may have slightly change its character but none of my tube amps worked well.

When it came to playing Music and using Tubes amplification from OTL Amplifiers to Push and Pull. The Quested just worked with everything very well.

transaudio
96 posts
 
It is true that ATC passives need a bit more power, the average sensitivity is 85-86dB 1 w/1m. This is because as a driver designer you have a choice: more efficiency, or more low end. ATC does NOT use transmission lines, passive drivers or other devices for serious low end support, as the roll off after such device is severe. But it is true dragon vibe, loudspeakers are an endless series of trade offs and ATC has chosen sealed box type (slow roll off) low end performance over efficiency.

Brad
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