Adam T5V Review (Studio Monitor)

[YSC]

This is pretty impressive performance for this segment. The “unshelved“ HF response is a mystery to me, but easily EQed away a noted.

Speaking of this and the cat fight over it which has ensued, I have an idea: given that every speaker requires some kind of correction to compensate for room variations anyway, wouldn’t the silver built product be an active speaker with built-in DSP accessible via Bluetooth and controllable on a phone or a pad with a dedicated app? I’m using outboard DSPs with those features ahead of my 16 JBL LSR 305s and 305Ps and 5 subs in my surround system. If you need to muck about with EQ, phase, distance and levels anyway, it would be cool if everything were in the speaker, some of today’s powered speakers being cost-effective elements in a modern surround system. I realize this would be viewed as irrelevant at best, or worse, complete anathema to the mantra of a minimalist signal path to the 2-channel crowd, but I don’t care about that. “Totally different market.”

Well if I remember correctly this is actually done on the Dutch & Dutch 8C, which is not "expensive" at ~99xx euro a pair.....
right now I think for most manufacturers they don't prefer to do so in "entry level" products but already have some bundles available from Genelec, Neumann etc. where those lines of monitors already cost quite a fortune.

For most products I feel the customer are either not completely competent in setting up the measurement rig needed for the room calibration and the extra cost of a simple calibrated mic to use with the software is pretty obstructive, say for a $2000 a pair purchase the extra of $100 for a mic setup to use with said EQ app for room mode is kind of acceptable, a $200 a pair isn't. and that ppl don't need a new mic set for every set of speaker they are buying. furthermore I feel manufacturers are less likely to want ppl to mess up with their house sound or reliability for some random guys who would like to say crank bass volume by 12db or more and kill off the driver or amp which cost warranty?

 

[fordiebianco]

Well, I have pulled the trigger on these and test them against my KEF LS50s which are currently doing nearfield desk duty. As they are active, they will create space by removing the amp from the desk. Will keep you updated.

 

[Aldoszx]

@amirm, do you think that the biggest brother, T8V would be a good choice ?
I would like to replace my old M-Audio Studiophile CX8 pair with a pair of Adam T8V.
Thank you !

 

[Juhazi]

^How about T7V? I just bought one for my bedroom TV, 199,-€
https://www.audioholics.com/bookshelf-speaker-reviews/adam-audio-t7v

But, what are you expecting to achieve by changing to a very similar speaker?

 

[andreasmaaan]

It's nice if THD <100Hz is lower than 15% on a 5'' chassis @96dB, but the important thing, as others have said, is whether it is audible.

As already shown in post#75, the masking effect alone should make the harmonic distortions inaudible.
Already at 70dB SL the masking for HD2-HD5 below 150Hz was around 10%. The masking curve is an average value of the study participants and may vary by a few percent for an individual, but in the case you discussed the sound level is 96dB!

As you know, masking does not increase linearly, but rises disproportionately with increasing sound pressure:
View attachment 97766
View attachment 97767
Source: Zwicker/Fastl - Psychoacoustics

These facts combined mean that even 30% THD at 96dB below 100Hz is most likely inaudible (this is my estimation based on the facts).
As @andreasmaaan has shown in post#95, one could theoretically deduce the masking in the low frequency range using the data from Zwicker.

So if the T5V shows 15% THD in places in the range <100Hz at 96dB, this is inaudible. But if comparable speakers in the 40-50Hz range show more than 100% THD, then this is audible and a clear advantage of the T5V which does not show this behavior.
This is exactly what @amirm says - actually not difficult to understand.

@March Audio before you say again, this is debatable, you should provide facts for it, otherwise it is only an opinion that does not want to get involved with existing facts.


This shows an advantage of the active concept of the T5V, which protects the woofer by a particularly steep sound pressure drop below 50Hz (by an additional electronic filter).
The sound pressure drop corresponds roughly to a fifth order BU filter.
View attachment 97770
The disadvantage is a higher group delay, which in the 50-100Hz range can sometimes be twice as large as with other loudspeaker concepts.

Totally agree with all of that @ctrl, but I think it's worth pointing out that, just because HD is unlikely to be audible at a particular frequency/SPL, this does not mean that IMD won't be (I guess that's implicit in your post, but you didn't actually mention it).

 

[Mulder]

The reality is that this is Amir's forum, Amir's money ($$$NFS$$$) and Amir's time, and this more or less means he's enitled to his opinion on products. The technical data is what it is, interpret that as you please. If you don't care for the subjective bit, don't read it.

Is this the essence of the scientific method?

 

[YSC]

Is this the essence of the scientific method?

That’s not, but personally I treat every review in 2 parts

1) measurements which are the scientific facts, hard cold graphs and numbers


2) subjective review which is amirm’s personal preference, it’s just like every other site is the reviewer’s opinion, he can say whatever his thought was, even say he loves low SINAD or huge amount of distortion is all of his personal freedom and will take a huge grain of salt on those.

it’s simple, I can buy a flat genelec to start of, but if I don’t like the EQed or dip switch applied more or less flat FR and love a huge bass boost or I love to roll off all bass and love a bright signature is all on my own right no?

 

[richard12511]

Well, I have pulled the trigger on these and test them against my KEF LS50s which are currently doing nearfield desk duty. As they are active, they will create space by removing the amp from the desk. Will keep you updated.

Would love to hear your impressions of that comparison.

 

[Mulder]

That’s not, but personally I treat every review in 2 parts

1) measurements which are the scientific facts, hard cold graphs and numbers


2) subjective review which is amirm’s personal preference, it’s just like every other site is the reviewer’s opinion, he can say whatever his thought was, even say he loves low SINAD or huge amount of distortion is all of his personal freedom and will take a huge grain of salt on those.

it’s simple, I can buy a flat genelec to start of, but if I don’t like the EQed or dip switch applied more or less flat FR and love a huge bass boost or I love to roll off all bass and love a bright signature is all on my own right no?

You miss the point.

 

[R.T]

My word probably doesn't hold much weight. As someone who hasn't contributed to this forum at all but actively reads the reviews and goes through most of its discussion pages (there's probably a whole lot of us), I don't see the point of raising general objections to one's methods in a specific review thread.

Users like me just want to see the data, the conclusions of the review and read the discussions concerning that data / product in its given thread. I don't wish at this stage see heated discussions of the reviewer's general philosophy, as that should already be established elsewhere.

I had to go through 20 pages only to see that the back-and-forth was still ongoing. I've never commented on this site before but even I know that there is a dedicated thread here for bringing up general ideas regarding testing methods, complaints etc. I wish such comments would be raised there instead of here.

 

[JRAudio]

An update on this. I measured some other passive speakers with higher bandwidth and the system is indeed measuring them correctly. So what you see in the latest review tests is correct as far as bandwidth/ADC sampling rate.

Thanks Amir for getting back on this. So from now on, you will add this “higher bandwidth” test in your THD test, in order to determine, if a speaker has internal a 48k DSP for active crossover. Great. I appreciate this a lot, as I appreciate that John Aktinson (Stereophile) is doing this higher bandwidth measurement. Otherwise this (bandwidth limitation) would be hidden. Thanks a lot.

 

[ck42]

Someone just do some thread pruning? Was just reading page 21 and now there's only 16?

 

[BDWoody]

I agree. This ongoing distraction from a competing brand is out of line in my opinion.

Ok, so I just butchered up this thread, and tried to cut out the part that was more appropriate in another thread, and moved it to another thread.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/marching-onward-re-distortion.18188/

There were about 100 posts moved, so if this one seems a bit disjointed, that's why...but I felt it was just unfair for this speaker review to get quite so derailed.

Let's try to keep 'things' more contained in their appropriate containers...
Cheers.

 

[temps]

oh man people were talking distortion and I missed it? I have been beating that drum for a while now...

Adam T5V performance measured every bit as good as I expected. I would have no hesitation recommending the T series over the old, out of date and poor value AX series these days.

This is pretty impressive performance for this segment. The “unshelved“ HF response is a mystery to me, but easily EQed away a noted.

Speaking of this and the cat fight over it which has ensued, I have an idea: given that every speaker requires some kind of correction to compensate for room variations anyway, wouldn’t the silver built product be an active speaker with built-in DSP accessible via Bluetooth and controllable on a phone or a pad with a dedicated app? I’m using outboard DSPs with those features ahead of my 16 JBL LSR 305s and 305Ps and 5 subs in my surround system. If you need to muck about with EQ, phase, distance and levels anyway, it would be cool if everything were in the speaker, some of today’s powered speakers being cost-effective elements in a modern surround system. I realize this would be viewed as irrelevant at best, or worse, complete anathema to the mantra of a minimalist signal path to the 2-channel crowd, but I don’t care about that. “Totally different market.”

Adam has monitors with DSP, but they hold it back for the S series which is 5x as expensive, unfortunately. It also doesn't have enough filters to really properly correct bass.. 6 x parametrics, high shelf and low shelf. I would only use it for broad tonality tweaks.

 

[Deleted member 65]

My Adam Artist 5 seems to have a bit more EQ possibilities

 

[BYRTT]

Interesting that while the LP6 has significantly (around 15 Hz) deeper bass, Amir perceived the T5V as more bassy although its only approximately 1dB between 70-90 Hz while in the rest the LP6 has more bass when both normalized to a similar listening volume, here the estimated in room responses of both:

View attachment 97388

A possible reason I can think of is the rear vs. frontal port which can couple differently to the room, some real listening position measurements would shed a light on that.

Interesting yes but if you allign them relative to on axis or listening window as below then PIR and sound power looks better in advantage for T5V , BTW temperature was low for both but LP-6 had it a +1,1º C better temperature under robot murder ..

When at it these nice low cost performers side by side detailed T5V verse LP-6..

 

[thewas]

Interesting yes but if you allign them relative to on axis or listening window as below then PIR and sound power looks better in advantage for T5V , BTW temperature was low for both but LP-6 had it a +1,1º C better temperature under robot murder ..

Your animations don't show anything very different than my static plot where the Adam has a higher FR in the mid bass (just yours is bit more shifted) vs. the Kali that has deeper bass.
The question that remains is how humans perceive and how they anchor the relative tonalities, which can also depend on the amplification/volume level set at each model, past psychoacoustic test has shown that often just 1 dB SPL more level is usually perceived as sounding better when everything else remains the same.
In the end we discuss too long and too much a short non-blinded listening test with the sample size of one which inherently is very limited and I also plead guilty there.

 

[BYRTT]

I'm beginning to wonder if that distortion spike at ~4k is the tweeter not liking being crossed over at ~2.5k. It seems to appear when the amp is pushed hard on every Adam TV series model I've seen reviewed on this site.

...Right, anyway. If anyone knows what's going on with that narrow band distortion spike on the tweeter between 4-5k I'd love to know. It appeared with the T8V as well which would make sense given the same tweeter.

Dont think you should worry its the tweeter that have problems in a area that should be comfort zone for tweeter devices and BTW based Amir's spindata my CAD software bench crossover region for T5V to really be around 3150Hz, will suspect its a woofer problem be it T5V or T8V and is caused voice coil inductance L(e) value for woofers are way higher than for tweeters even some woofers have advanced motors that can improve that parameter, if you filter out (crossover) woofer much lower then where its L(e) value start its nonlinear skyhigh impedance climb is not a problem but when run so high it gonna meet a tweeters flat impedance then their timings are way out of sync and if too much can be catched into distortion graphs.

 

[amirm]

@amirm, do you think that the biggest brother, T8V would be a good choice ?

I actually reviewed the T8V: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/adam-t8v-studio-monitor-review.17118/



The larger woofer/speaker play louder but the crossover is not quite as clean as this one. The smaller driver here helps with directiviy.

If you need the volume though, by all means get the T8V as nothing sounds worse than a speaker at its limit.

 

[BYRTT]

Your animations don't show anything very different than my static plot where the Adam has a higher FR in the mid bass (just yours is bit more shifted) vs. the Kali that has deeper bass.
The question that remains is how humans perceive and how they anchor the relative tonalities, which can also depend on the amplification/volume level set at each model, past psychoacoustic test has shown that often just 1 dB SPL more level is usually perceived as sounding better when everything else remains the same.
In the end we discuss too long and too much a short non-blinded listening test with the sample size of one which inherently is very limited and I also plead guilty there.

Your guilty and me too lower set PIR is yours upper set PIR is mine, think it does a difference in advantage for T5V and what Amir percieved but you right theres a lot of dependencies.