Bruce B
WBF Founding Member, Pro Audio Production Member
I've heard ATC's quite a few times and have never liked them. I'd always get a headache listening to them.
A question of value in today's hi-end.
- Thread starter DaveyF
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I've heard ATC's quite a few times and have never liked them. I'd always get a headache listening to them.
See, all in your mind, or from your own ears! 
Soooooooo, nobody can tell fo sur what true High-End should sound like! It's only a perception, an illusion!
And even less what true Value means! It is a totally personal situation.
Soooooooo, nobody can tell fo sur what true High-End should sound like! It's only a perception, an illusion!
And even less what true Value means! It is a totally personal situation.
An acquaintance of mine owned an old pair of active ATC SCM50s. They had great presence and detail, but were too tiring for daily use. Some preamplifiers, such as the KRELL KRC and Audio Research REF2 could soften their sound, but heard with the matching ATC preamplifier they were really aggressive sounding. I remember hearing that a more recent version had improved tweeters, but could not be fitted to his pair.
Hi Bruce,
I recall your mentioning that somwhere...which ATC's had you heard
My brief exposure to ATC SCM150ASL Pro reminded me of hearing Avalon Isis, I believe, driven by Edge amplification and an Einstein pre. Sources were Esoteric P-03, D-03, and G-03 and Rockport Sirius tt, unsure of cart...may have been an A90, and Einstein phono.
The front end for the ATC's were 15 ips reel, mastered for vinyl.
I'd love to hear your thoughts...thanks, Bruce.
Hi Micro,
Appreciate your thoughts
Components/drivers may have changed...the ATC's I heard were probably a current model. Also, the room was treated and the signal travelled through a passive volume control. 
If I may, I see a bit of a fallacy here developing here when it comes to using professional products as a basis. When Bob says nobody knows what High End should sound like, the same can be said about professional monitors. When we talk about two way professional monitors you'll find as dizzying an array of professional monitor options as you would for the home. Perhaps not as many choices, but surely more than enough to drive anyone in a hurry to choose just one quite batty. If all pro monitors were true to the source, they would all sound the same. Well, they don't. To make a loudspeaker category e.g. Professional Monitors the standard that category must have a standard of it's own.
Many commercial studios will have a choice of nearfields for non-house engineers to choose from and studios with more than one house engineer will likely have a monitor for each. One might like say a Genelec and the other a KRK, someone visiting might be more partial to Tannoys and another old Haflers. They could all be 1" tweeter, 8" woofer, actively bi-amped and acoustically suspended. The question is, why? The answer might be a bit surprising because we have to go a step past preference to the reason for the preference. That next step would be familiarity. After all, an engineer's job isn't just to record and mix and master as faithfully as possible, like it or not the biggest priority is to to do so in a manner that the final output will translate well to the final user, wherever he may be and whatever he might be listening to it through. To do that, you've got to know what every piece of gear you use, adds or subtracts and that begins with what you hear, your monitors, and goes back the chain all the way back to your microphones. In other words, accept the fact no monitor is perfect, suck it up, commit to what you can work on for hours and day at a time and commit to it.
Now I apologize if I'm coming off as a bit authoritative here. For context some of you know I've had both feet in the trenches of both worlds. What even fewer of you know is that we are part owners of a media network that does movies, television, television and radio commercials, music , radio shows for AM and FM and own and maintain the broadcast infrastructure. No, this does not make me an expert by any stretch. It does mean, we hire them. It also means we have to know what they require and know the difference between what is required and what is plain capricious. We are a publicly listed company, stockholders do not like capricious behavior.
This brings me back to familiarity. I am very saddened every time I see people switch equipment frequently. I think that too many people hope to get miraculous results just by changing a piece of kit, so much so that they DO hear miracles and sadly a few days later the gains turn out to be small ones if ever and instead of being able to properly appreciate the gains, it comes invariably with a sense of disappointment. Well, I've been there, I think we all have one time or another. To avoid this all that's really needed is patience and a healthy but non-paralyzing dose of cynicism.
Many commercial studios will have a choice of nearfields for non-house engineers to choose from and studios with more than one house engineer will likely have a monitor for each. One might like say a Genelec and the other a KRK, someone visiting might be more partial to Tannoys and another old Haflers. They could all be 1" tweeter, 8" woofer, actively bi-amped and acoustically suspended. The question is, why? The answer might be a bit surprising because we have to go a step past preference to the reason for the preference. That next step would be familiarity. After all, an engineer's job isn't just to record and mix and master as faithfully as possible, like it or not the biggest priority is to to do so in a manner that the final output will translate well to the final user, wherever he may be and whatever he might be listening to it through. To do that, you've got to know what every piece of gear you use, adds or subtracts and that begins with what you hear, your monitors, and goes back the chain all the way back to your microphones. In other words, accept the fact no monitor is perfect, suck it up, commit to what you can work on for hours and day at a time and commit to it.
Now I apologize if I'm coming off as a bit authoritative here. For context some of you know I've had both feet in the trenches of both worlds. What even fewer of you know is that we are part owners of a media network that does movies, television, television and radio commercials, music , radio shows for AM and FM and own and maintain the broadcast infrastructure. No, this does not make me an expert by any stretch. It does mean, we hire them. It also means we have to know what they require and know the difference between what is required and what is plain capricious. We are a publicly listed company, stockholders do not like capricious behavior.
This brings me back to familiarity. I am very saddened every time I see people switch equipment frequently. I think that too many people hope to get miraculous results just by changing a piece of kit, so much so that they DO hear miracles and sadly a few days later the gains turn out to be small ones if ever and instead of being able to properly appreciate the gains, it comes invariably with a sense of disappointment. Well, I've been there, I think we all have one time or another. To avoid this all that's really needed is patience and a healthy but non-paralyzing dose of cynicism.
I don't see that Tim or Bruce or I were making Professional Monitors the standard. We started with the possibility of using active speakers in a good value system and moved to a discussion of ATC monitors - do they sound good or not?
Just having limited resources and more than enough calls on those resources is an effective restraint on me.
For many vocal audiophiles, the hobby seems to be about spending money on a stream of purchases. Swapping perfectly good gear for something else that may or may not be significantly better seems to be essential to that pattern.
Bill
I read your post but just read your SOS link just now. If you read my post I think you'll see, my post says in a nutshell what SOS is saying. I can't be referring to Bruce since he uses both types so I was referring to Tim's post 181 which was in response to Micro's Dynaudio post.
I don't see that your "I see a bit of a fallacy" paragraph in post # 190 says the same thing as the SOS article. Your assertion does set up a straw man for you to attack.
I re-read your post (and the rest of the thread) again before I posted # 192 and quoted the paragraph I was referring too. I stand my my response to your earlier post. Make your case with factual arguments rather than telling me to re-read your post.
Your rambling discussion in post # 190 of the variety of preferences among audio engineers doesn't support your first paragraph. Pro-audio monitors aren't all the same; audio engineers don't all prefer the same monitor; audio engineers prefer to use monitors they are familiar with. Did you have a point beyond these obvious conclusions?
Bill
That post wasn't attempting to position pro monitors as a standard audiophile systems should aspire to, Jack, it was dismissing the notion that pro and domestic speakers have different standards at all. They can, I suppose, but when they do, at least one has an objective other than the highest level of fidelity possible within the design and budget limitations of the system, and that's the only objective I'm personally interested in.
Tim
Hi Bill post 190 was my unsuccessful attempt at politely saying I wasn't referring or talking to you. Next time I'll be more direct. If you felt alluded to, it was clearly my mistake, please accept my apologies.
Hi Tim, you know I've been known to see things incorrectly so thank you for the clarification-slash-correction Yes they can have highest fidelity as an objective and both have examples of ruler flat FR designs with low distortion.
In the SOS article a monitor was mentioned that was anything but ruler flat. I've worked with it as well as the monitors they replaced as an old standard the Auratones, nicknamed "horror tones" That monitor would be the Yamaha NS10M. Tipped up with a mid-bass hump. Flawed as these were they were found in a whole lot of studios because engineers were familiar with them and thus it was easier to translate what they were hearing with what the consumer would hear later. I always wondered how these speakers gained so much popularity that is until I got my hands on the Auratones which had no highs and no bass (single driver, tiny enclosure). If the Yamaha had anything going for it, it was ruthlessly revealing and the company had a knack for knocking out units with very high consistency via QC. Just to be sure though it was and maybe still is commonplace for a dub to be made so the producer could take a spin in his car to see if the track "translated".
The only fallacy I hoped wasn't developing was that If it is made for the Pro market it must be of higher fidelity. Since Bill wants a fact that supports my view I submit the case of the LS3/5a developed by the BBC for mobile monitoring where the primary goal was not ultimately fidelity to the signal but rather broke new ground by altering the signal for better speech intelligibility. Here's where things get a little tricky because fidelity can be approached as sounds flat to the listener at a given position or measures/is technically flat at a given position. So if we look at the professional market what we will find a pragmatic approach that seeks to not abide to a hardline philosophy but rather to offer a package of solutions to address varying operational requirements. Requirements would affect which approach is more effective. The psychoacoustic approach taken by the BBC does have lots of pluses for noisy environments (mobile) especially when the broadcast is live and one doesn't have the luxury of post and the final objective is for the listener to understand what is being said and not so much how faithful the broadcast was to the mic feed. That the LS3/5a when taken out of the van turned out to be a colored but beautiful sounding classic loudspeaker might have been just an accident but what a wonderful accident it was.
Hi Tim, you know I've been known to see things incorrectly so thank you for the clarification-slash-correction
Yes they can have highest fidelity as an objective and both have examples of ruler flat FR designs with low distortion. In the SOS article a monitor was mentioned that was anything but ruler flat. I've worked with it as well as the monitors they replaced as an old standard the Auratones, nicknamed "horror tones"
That monitor would be the Yamaha NS10M. Tipped up with a mid-bass hump. Flawed as these were they were found in a whole lot of studios because engineers were familiar with them and thus it was easier to translate what they were hearing with what the consumer would hear later. I always wondered how these speakers gained so much popularity that is until I got my hands on the Auratones which had no highs and no bass (single driver, tiny enclosure). If the Yamaha had anything going for it, it was ruthlessly revealing and the company had a knack for knocking out units with very high consistency via QC. Just to be sure though it was and maybe still is commonplace for a dub to be made so the producer could take a spin in his car to see if the track "translated". The only fallacy I hoped wasn't developing was that If it is made for the Pro market it must be of higher fidelity. Since Bill wants a fact that supports my view I submit the case of the LS3/5a developed by the BBC for mobile monitoring where the primary goal was not ultimately fidelity to the signal but rather broke new ground by altering the signal for better speech intelligibility. Here's where things get a little tricky because fidelity can be approached as sounds flat to the listener at a given position or measures/is technically flat at a given position. So if we look at the professional market what we will find a pragmatic approach that seeks to not abide to a hardline philosophy but rather to offer a package of solutions to address varying operational requirements. Requirements would affect which approach is more effective. The psychoacoustic approach taken by the BBC does have lots of pluses for noisy environments (mobile) especially when the broadcast is live and one doesn't have the luxury of post and the final objective is for the listener to understand what is being said and not so much how faithful the broadcast was to the mic feed. That the LS3/5a when taken out of the van turned out to be a colored but beautiful sounding classic loudspeaker might have been just an accident but what a wonderful accident it was.
Tim,
There is no standard sound of professional monitor speakers - Toyle circle of confusion is a good evidence of it. Could you name some brands and models you are referring as target models in you comments?
There is no standard sound of professional monitor speakers - Toyle circle of confusion is a good evidence of it. Could you name some brands and models you are referring as target models in you comments?
That would, indeed, be a fallacy and that post of mine up there was a response to the self-contradicting quote from Dynaudio's site about their pro and domestic lines. There have been and are pro monitors of many different colors, including the Dynas, which definitely lean in the warm direction. I do think actives are a very good choice for domestic listening, though. I wish there were more aimed at that market.
Tim
I ordered a pair of Adams by the way (with the pads of course hehehehe). I'm pretty excited to use them with my G5, I also have a Rel Quake I can use as a foot rest. I'll be using a Bel Canto 1.5 DAC.
I can't name them because you're right, they all sound a bit different. My response to the Dyna marketing department nonsense about their domestic and pro lines having completely different objectives, except for the objective of perfect accuracy has been misunderstood. The truth, as I see it, is that there is no clear separation between their lines (only their target markets) and that perfect accuracy isn't the objective of either. Sorry if I confused. My personal preference is for transparency wherever I can get it, but the qualifier "within the design and budget limitations" is huge when it comes to speakers. Still, I'll take "boring," and "laid back" over excitement every day.
Electronics are another issue. I don't see much excuse for audible inaccuracy in well-designed components.
Tim
I ordered a pair of Adams by the way (with the pads of course hehehehe). I'm pretty excited to use them with my G5, I also have a Rel Quake I can use as a foot rest. I'll be using a Bel Canto 1.5 DAC.
That should be a really good desktop system. Which Adams did you order?
Tim
Change is good Jack, it is the essence of familiarity!
Without change you cannot notice how familiar you are to your "Sound".
Tim- I had Barefoot MM27s in my room for a week. Pretty cool speaks, and better looking than most. Many studios are going Barefoot direction. That said, I did not prefer them to Dynaudio C1s at the same pricing point. I found the Barefoots worked better nearfield.
I've heard some Adams are good---but some have been not so good as that TAS article a few months ago reviewed. Looked into K&Hs---but they have limiters at 100dbs or something that kick in.
I've heard some Adams are good---but some have been not so good as that TAS article a few months ago reviewed. Looked into K&Hs---but they have limiters at 100dbs or something that kick in.
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