AudioMedia - December 2008 - (Page 23) ADAM | S2A basement, you might need to look for something bigger. I don’t think you’ll get much better bass of a speaker this size – it’s a physics thing. I N F O R MAT I O N The Need To Tweak So there you have it – a great mid/top and a decent bottom end, nice enough cabinets, and they do loud. “But what of the built-in EQ?”, I hear you cry. Well, to be honest, I never felt the need to tweak, except turning the gain down a bit to match my Merging Dua. It’s there if you want it. And in the end I even forgot about the clever technology of the Heil driver – it’s the sound after all. It’s hard to have anything but enthusiasm for the ADAM S As, I would very happily mix on these five days a week and twice at the weekend. This quality doesn’t come cheap, so don’t expect to snag a pair for a couple of hundred quid, but after a month I’m still getting a healthy dose of NMS, and for me that’s worth paying for. ∫ £ GB£1,128.00 (inc.VAT) A ADAM Audio GmbH, Edertr. 16, D-12059 Berlin, Germany T +49 30 863 0097 0 F +49 30 863 0097 7 W www.ADAM-audio.com E info@ADAM-audio.de A UK Distributor: Unity Audio A The Elms Barn, Baythorne End, Halstead, Essex CO9 4AB T +44 (0) 1440 785843 F +44 (0) 1440 785845 W www.unityaudio.co.uk E sales@unityaudio.co.uk monitors actually working. This is especially true when balancing speech. The upshot of it is that much like the rest of me, my old ears get tired easily and I’m very unforgiving of any unforgiving HF. I’ve had the ADAMs in my system for a month or so now, and they are very, very good. I like to think that good monitors, like good lenses, offer increases in detail, contrast, and tonal accuracy. I found myself constantly hearing things in old familiar recordings that had slipped past me with other speakers. I know from past experience that often if I return to the previous monitors, I will be able to hear what had previously eluded me. But I ‘heard it here first’, if you know what I mean. www.neumann.com “To be honest I don’t listen as loudly as I used to, but for many of us, the ability to generate high SPLs without racking up distortion is a significant plus. I found the S2As coming through with flying colours, staying clean at all the levels I would want to listen to.” From Way Up H igh The third area of monitor design that is often a problem is performance at higher levels. As you whack the gain up, all sorts of non-linearities start to pop up. Resonances bloom, curves run off the knee, and saturation and compression effects begin to manifest themselves. To be honest I don’t listen as loudly as I used to, but for many of us, the ability to generate high SPLs without racking up distortion is a significant plus. I found the S As coming through with flying colours, staying clean at all the levels I would want to listen to. Listening loud, I did begin to ponder the question of bass extension. ADAM’s literature quotes Hz +/- dB, and that does seem like a long way down for what is not, after all, a huge box. One of my few reservations about the S As would be that if a lot of your mixing is down in the neumann. the voice of music history Georg Neumann GmbH • Ollenhauerstraße 98 • 13403 Berlin • Germany • www.neumann.com AUDIO MEDIA DECEMBER 2008 23 http://www.ADAM-audio.com http://www.unityaudio.co.uk http://www.neumann.com http://www.neumann.com http://www.neumann.com
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