![]() "lt's the first time I've heard those tracks properly since 1995," she said. Wiring my Mac into the SIACD music centre and using the (superb) new Tidal high-quality streaming service, I played my sister-in-law, Louise Wener (who sang in the Britpop band Sleeper), some of her own songs and she grew quite emotional. ![]() Listening to the SCM11 speakers, the astonishing clarity, separation and bass heft quite knocked me over. SCM11 & SIACD, Financial Times "How to Spend It". The ATC SCM11 is a clear winner and readily achieves a HIFICRITIC Best Buy accolade." Martin Colloms, HIFICRITIC March 2016. It proved easy to fine-tune its location in the listening room, and is also an easy amplifier load. Build quality is first class, and the lab report would grace a design at five times the price. Although it's not perfectly neutral in the midrange, the listener is mightily rewarded with enthusiastic musical drive, great dynamics, very good clarity and detail and exceptional bass rhythms. Not only does the ATC SCM11 reach beyond its class for sound quality but it does so through exceptional engineering, and shows seriously good taste in balancing the frequency response. In use, both speakers had the well-controlled, reasonably well-extended bass you hope for from a sealed-box design."If you think that this reads like a positive review, then you would be right. I'd have to call the specifications race a tie. ATC claims low-frequency extension for the SCM 11 of 56Hz, ≦dB Aerial, 60Hz, ≢dB, and 50Hz, ≨dB. Stated impedance is 8 ohms for the ATC vs 4 ohms for the Aerial. (Of course, this does not translate into twice as much bass.) ATC claims a sensitivity of 85dB for the SCM 11 vs Aerial's claim of 86dB for the 5B. Perhaps more importantand I keep making a point of this because I think it's both nonintuitive and often overlooked by audiophiles while shoppingthe Aerial 5B's 7.1" mid/woofer has just about twice the surface area of the ATC SCM 11's 6" cone: 39.59 vs 19.63 in 2. So the ATC's cabinet is about 10% larger. The Aerial 5B measures 13" high by 7.9" wide by 10.8" deep, displaces 1109 in 3, and weighs 22 lbs. The ATC SCM 11's cabinet measures 15" high by 8.3" wide by 9.8" deep, displaces 1220 in3, and weighs 17.6 lbs. A recess in the rear panel holds two pairs of sturdy, knurled, non≮C-compliant binding posts of brass, with brass jumpers installed for single-wiring.ĪTC's SCM 11 and Aerial Acoustics' 5B (which I wrote about in June) are variations on the same themesealed-box, stand-mounted two-ways costing about $2000/pairso it seemed reasonable to compare them. Black fabric grilles on MDF frames attach to the speaker with plastic pins, but I didn't use them. The baffle is made of some sort of composite, and finished in a soft piano-black semigloss. Although the cabinets of the review pair I received were veneered in cherrywood (with exceptional matching across the pair), the drivers are inset in a baffle board that sits proud of the cabinet face and covers all but its bottom few inches (which are veneered). The SCM 11 is a stand-mounted two-way design with a 1" soft-dome tweeter with a neodymium magnet structure and a waveguide of some proprietary alloy, and a 6" mid/woofer. Nonetheless, the SCM 11's CLD cone is claimed to reduce distortion between 300Hz and 3kHz by an unstated amount. Super Linear technology is claimed to reduce third-order harmonic distortion 10≡5dB between 100Hz and 3kHz, which makes me eager to hear it. The SCM 19 costs $3150/pair, which puts it outside the limits of this hunt for affordable systems (though it looks very tempting). The SCM 11 has Constrained Layer Damping (CLD) on its cone but doesn't share the Super Linear magnet technology found in the SCM 19, a superficially similar two-way with the same size woofer in a larger cabinet. (ATC's larger designs are ported.)ĪTC's lineup of consumer speakers includes one model below the SCM 11, the SCM 7, which has a 5" mid/woofer and costs $1050/pair. I didn't realize until I removed the SCM 11 from its cloth bag that its bass loading is sealed-box had I known that, I would have requested them even earlier. I requested a pair of ATC's SCM 11 passive monitors because its price of $1750/pair in real cherry veneer (or $1850/pair in black ash) fit into my quest to find affordable systems in the $2500$3750 range. ATC loudspeakers are all still made in the UK, and were a favorite of the late J. The venerable British company ATC Loudspeaker Technology was founded in 1974 by Billy Woodman, and is famous within the professional community for developing the first soft-dome midrange driver, and for their well-regarded line of active (powered) studio monitors, the user list of which is a veritable Who's Who of mastering engineers.
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