So translating this to home, the same thing is true: if you want to hear the enormous detail within MJ's Thriller, you have to have a chain that reveals ALL of that stuff. So if you hook up a pair of ATCs and say "yuck", the idea is you better figure out why because it is NOT your speakers. The reason people like Ryan Ulyate and others like him have depended on ATC for artists like Tom Petty for years is that very revelation-the artist and his helpers want a error free product. ATC's are brutal on gear upstream and will reveal all the problems in your chain. The whole point of a loudspeaker from Atc's perspective is to reveal the source- whatever that may be. There is much talk - even in studio circles- of speakers that "show flaws" vs "emphasize flaws" vs cover them up. While ATC's preamps can be very good, I have preferred other brands of preamps for what I want to hear from the speakers. If you don't play around with the ancillaries you won't know. Those same speaker models could be made to sound very good by changing software or surrounding hardware. When they sounded "bad" it was a bad sounding source or other product in the line, in my experience. I've heard them sound bad, good and sublime. I've either owned or spent extended time (months) with virtually all of ATC's line, passive and powered from 7s up to 100s. That suggests to me that ATC can do a very good job. If you check out artists with a reputation for very good sound, many are mastered on ATC speakers. There are probably more refined speakers in the world than ATC, but that's different than saying ATC "emphasise errors." A colored speaker/system will obscure detail letting noise (not signal) through. No one needs a speaker that emphasizes errors, just one that shows distortion, if it's there.I'm not going to defend ATC from people that don't like them - no point. The principles discussed are all still current.Ĭlick to expand.Hear Here. So that being said as background of why you don’t see more tests, what test do you want to see? BTW, the 26 year old white paper is still valid as drivers mentioned are still in production. One could get the idea from the tests its revealing a product flaw when in reality its the space or the mic or ?. While we understand our measurements, I would not print them or rely on them as “proof” of specific virtue because our space has some acoustic anomalies in the LF band. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out why there is a 20dB null somewhere when this is normal, and the max variation on +/- 2dB would be only 4dB.Īt TransAudio/Lone Mountain we use our AP 515X with all the acoustical software and a calibrated mic constantly at work to calibrate, measure and test ATC’s in the diagnose and repair or upgrade process. If the variation is not printed, it is NOT easy for the average buyer or user to recognize 20-20K does not compare to 20- 20K +/- 2dB in any way. +/- 6dB also equals a 12dB swing at times, something very significant that you would easily hear. Make it +/- 6dB it looks a lot better, and in fact this has become “usable limit” in many live sound speaker tests. So manufacturers don’t print that because no one would buy the mic based on this +/- 1dB test. Microphones are similar, the true response curve at +/- 1dB is not pretty at all! It looks all over the place. A smart person not familiar with the test could make an incorrect assumption that this driver was not good compared to others because they did not know all the comparison driver tests were smoothed. Yet, the engineer explained probably for the 20th time today, this is the way they REALLY are and there was no error. It was awful and my instant reaction was “ something is wrong”. I remember the first time I saw a non smoothed HF driver response curve while at JBL. +/- 2dB can reveal some good info, but you still don’t know about the space or how the speaker was tested. 20-20K measurement means nothing without the variation limits: +/- 10dB, +/- 6dB or +/- 2dB are all dramatically different tests in terms of value to the user. A flawed acoustic space would not reveal itself either. A non calibrated mic for example, would not reveal itself in the test. I know many live by measurements, but ATC knows them too and knows how results can be flawed by process, environment or set up and yield conclusions that are not accurate. I have to say that test methods and data are very difficult to make universal and transferrable.
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