Your thoughts about ATC loudspeakers

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!

itzhak1969
I guess you could say ATC speakers like power, as greater dynamic range with low end = the need for higher system gain. However, last I looked, there are plenty of used Brystons and used PASS Labs and other excellent larger amplifiers available at very nice prices.

At low SPL levels they can function just fine on a smaller amplifier. Your perception of efficiency depends on the expected playback SPL level plus the amp you already own?

A small amp drives driver/horns quite loud but then there are the off axis response problems of this design as frequency goes up-a clear trade offs. Horns can have 90 degrees horizontal dispersion at 1.5K but collapse to 2 degrees or less horizontal at 15K. This makes for some very different reflections compared to the direct (on axis) sound and this can present some real challenges to imaging.

12/octave rolloff below useable LF is the preferred "performance goal" of an ATC loudspeaker design. If rolloff starts at 80Hz, its down -12 at 40Hz- (this is roughly what a SCM 19 does). Many bass reflex or other bass boost designs can have a big boost at 80Hz- which sounds like lots of bass- but then be down - 48dB at 40Hz. So the deep bass trade off is clearly obvious in this case.

So perhaps the awareness of the trade off is sufficient and then we get to choose the trade off we prefer?  It's not all good one way and not good the other as we all have different "wants".   

Brad