Recording - December 2009 - 42

BY LORENZ RYCHNER ATC hails from the UK and has been going since 1976, initially in the PA component business, and for many years now producing active and passive monitors of varying designs. A quick look on the net shows that some of its higher-end models are hotly debated by hi-fi aficionados for whom money is no object. ATC SCM 11 Monitors A remarkable passive monitor from a well-respected maker woofer, with linking bars firmly connecting the two pairs. If bi-amping is not your aim, simply leave the linking bars in place and use either of the two pairs of posts for your speaker cable. mellifluous Jane Monheit on her DVD-Audio Dream With Me, accompanied only by Kenny Barron on piano, and later by a full band with two horns, showed off this speaker’s ability to deliver out-front vocals without making the out-frontness turn harsh; if Jane Monheit ever sounds harsh, it’s the speaker’s fault To further test this speaker’s apparent ability to deliver midrange out in front without harshness, I went to an SACD disc of Alison Krauss, and both Alison and an unaccompanied Jerry Douglas Dobro solo sounded perfect! And when the Union Station band came in, to raucous applause, the rich detail of the instrumentation was even more impressive. I only listened in stereo (it’s a 5.1 disc) but I was there! The many colors of a Big Band are always revealing in audio evaluations, and Steve Hufstetter’s hi-def Big Band release Gathered Around again showed the speaker’s tendency towards slightly forward midrange, as did a DVD-A disc of Robert Cray. There is no smiley-face curve here, but not the opposite, either—this tendency to reveal midrange is nothing like the hyping of midrange we sometimes hear that results in mixes where the vocals would need an extra few dB to stand out. These speakers don’t try to sound pretty, there is no disguising going on—if an instrument sounds shrill, you’ll hear it presented shrill. Is this richly detailed midrange taking away from the bass? Not here. There is true bass, smoothly extending way down, without getting an extra lift anywhere in the range. The spec says it’s down by 6 dB at 56 Hz, which tallies insofar as there is not a huge low end. Depending on your listening habits you may take a moment to wean yourself off your usual subwoofer, and depending on your room the bass you hear might be on the warm side, but it is never wooly, always distinct. Will you need a subwoofer? Possibly, at least because subs give good client, and if you produce music that lives and dies by huge low end. I heard plenty of bass on a DVD-A of Marley’s African Herbsman or on Queen Latifah’s The Dana Owens Album, and neither is known for hyped bass—I heard just tight and very musical bass. More important than the sheer power of bass presentation is the ability to define just what kind of bass it is, even at the bottom of The SCM 11, while not cheap, is the most affordable ATC pro-application monitor available in the USA from its American distributor TransAudio Group. Care should be taken not to confuse it with the consumer version available in the UK and shown on ATC’s own website; the specs are the same, but the only cabinet finish available in the USA is black. The box The SCM 11 is a fairly hefty cabinet, at 8.5 kg (almost 19 lbs.), and maybe a bit taller than your typical nearfield monitor, at (HxWxD) 15 x 8.3 x 9.8 inches. A black clipon cloth grille covers both the 25 mm tweeter with its waveguide and the 150 mm woofer. There is a slight overhang at the front where the lowest 3 inches or so are recessed, but this is not a bass port—this cabinet is fully sealed. The rear has twin sets of binding posts, one pair each for the tweeter and for theRECORDING DECEMBER 2009 A fair bit of design wizardry has gone into the making of this box. If you’re a speaker techie, you’ll find much tech-talk on the ATC website www.atc.gb.net. But we’re here to listen, so let’s get to the music, shall we? Listening ATC states that the design resulting in extended bass response makes for reduced sensitivity, thus requiring plenty of amplifier power to do these speakers justice so that they wouldn’t distort (or worse) at loud levels. Well, loud would have to be really L-O-U-D, because my Denon amp with about 100W per side did just fine. These boxes speak plenty loud in a room of the average home-studio size. All that high-end talk I read in advance of setting up these speakers raised my expectations, so I went for my stack of high-resolution discs of artists I had heard in person, just to make sure I’d be on safe ground. The
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Recording - December 2009

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