Your thoughts about ATC loudspeakers

Go active! ATC speakers are wonderful at high volumes but they are not good at low volumes. Passive versions are even worse. If you want to have passive speakers I would check out PMC twenty.5 series. Phenomenal tweeter and a very fast transmissonline bass. They do low volumes much better. The ATC SCM40 doesn't have much quality bass, 2-way PMC would be the better choice in my opinion. If you go active consider the all digital GRIMM Audio LS1be. Best speaker I have heard with a good price / performance ratio - again better at lower volumes than ATC.

My passive SCM40 V2 passive sound great at low to moderate volumes and render bass very accurately and powerfully down to the lower limit of the woofers. I must have bought a good pair. 

;)

I am aware that I am responding to an old post. But I wanted to share my experience with ATC SCM19 v2 speakers. I have had JBL, Klipsch, KEFs (including bookshelf LS50), B&W and DALI over the years. But these ATC 19 speakers are at different league all together. I am running them (95% of the time) with  Benchmark DAC3 > Benchmark AHB2 (100watts). I have a small listening area, and speakers are placed 3 inches from the front wall. They are extremely musical, fantastic sound stage (although limited in my smaller setup), non-fatiguing and accurate sounding speakers I ever had. I listen to classical, vocals, rock and these speakers can play them all the way it should be played. Tonally they sound extremely balanced (although sometimes, I do get a bit of harshness at higher frequencies).

These speakers play very well with my 100watts amp (even at lower volumes), but are able to produce a bit more fuller sound with amps with higher wattage. I use them with my other  amps - such Parasound A21 & Cambridge Audio 851W. But I play them most of the time with my 100 watts amp, and never felt anything lacking from the music.

Just my 2 cents. 

@ssnkssnk   

Welcome to the forums. You can display photos of your system setup on this site. Harshness will be source dependent. The speakers are very revealing of the source. CD loudness wars have resulted in quite a lot of harsh sounding pop/rock.

@shadorne
Thanks for your warm welcome and your good suggestions about potential causes of harshness. I am very excited to be a part of this community and looking forward to learn from all the good people here.

Whilst I do not want to open the can of worms and start another controversial topic - I would like to share that with my old speaker cable (MOGAMI), I never had this issue of harshness (maybe I was not getting the full dynamic spectrum). The speaker cables I am using currently are relatively new (very revealing) and may get better with some burn in. (Yes, I do believe in burn-in phenomenon). With professionally fitted connectors in this new cable, I am getting a lot better sound-staging, better gain (and some harshness). When I contacted the cable company, they also suggested to look into the source (as you also mentioned). All the tracks in question were downloaded from HDTracks, and one would expect 'quality'. I would know more in few days time. 


Thanks again!