Adam A5X Review (Powered Studio Monitor)

[Mountain Goat]

The speaker reviewed is mine. Before that I owned the T5V and I can say that the A5X is superior. The clarity and separion of voice and instruments is significantly better and it goes a great deal louder. I'm sure there is more and cleaner power on tap.

I use the A5X with a SVS SB1000 sub crossed at 80hz so I don't miss the low end.

I cross my A5Xs over to a Rythmik F12G.

I suppose much depends on the size of the stereo triangle (the smaller the better).

Yeah, desktop with room correction. Super near field is great.

 

[YSC]

F-Series (F5/F7)... because I designed most of it ;-) Sadly, the matching subwoofer never went in production. With these subs this was actually a 3-way with very good integration, truly designed to act as one speaker (unlike typical "general-purpose" subs)
In absolute terms the F-Series isn't pefect, of course. The cheap woofer's soft cone is sure a bit sloppy and certainly not a king of resolution. But the F-Series is very low distortion within its class (many tricks done in the electronics done for this), and it has a better port (though again some notching).
Again, I prefer the F5 to the F7, and both are fatigue-free for me, well suited to long listening sessions. For some monitoring work, less so (see previous post for as to why).

And the "classic" S3X-H is quite nice of course (though it has severe port issues), also some of the smaller HiFi models in the Tensor series.

I left ADAM in 2014 so I can't comment on newer models.

I remember saw Tyll once reviewers the F5 favourably and really interested in them, do you have any measurements for us to have a reference?

 

[sharock]

It'd be good to see how monitors from those that broke away from Adam measure by comparison (EVE and HEDD).

 

[KSTR]

I remember saw Tyll once reviewers the F5 favourably and really interested in them, do you have any measurements for us to have a reference?

I'm not going to publish any measurements I made at ADAM, I think you sure will understand.
In general, EQ-wise it has the ADAM House Sound of that era, and quite similar to the AX in general as the concept is really similar.

 

[Zvu]

http://www.sdsmusic.ch/fileadmin/sdsmusic/PDFs/ADAM/Test_F-5_Sound__Recording_03_13.PDF

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url...ved=0CAkQjhxqFwoTCJCyreaXnvACFQAAAAAdAAAAABAX

 

[EXIF68]

Close the Port's with foam and use a subwoofer and you will get a nearby perfect speaker ;-)

 

[FeddyLost]

Close the Port's with foam and use a subwoofer and you will get a nearby perfect speaker

Unless you try to crank up spl and fry its innards due to lack of airflow.

I currently still have ARTist 5, which is very decent all-rounder even with its cheapskate codec DAC. Some extra brilliance from tweeter can be turned down with tone controls.
Sincerely said, if i'd lost all my audio equipment and had to start again from scratch, I'd buy them again due to great price-sound-options ratio.

 

[YSC]

http://www.sdsmusic.ch/fileadmin/sdsmusic/PDFs/ADAM/Test_F-5_Sound__Recording_03_13.PDF

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https://www.musikmedia.de/mstore.php?SKU=REC0009644-000&psig=AOvVaw1OTzKATcoc5UBPUeF5A5Rw&ust=1619604691301000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAkQjhxqFwoTCJCyreaXnvACFQAAAAAdAAAAABAX

It looks descent but that 1khz dip seems even more severe?

 

[Helicopter]

...always was marketing ploy. The tweeter was hand-built in Germany and then mounted into the box which arrived fully pre-assembled and tested from China.

I expect to pay more for something where value was created in a high cost location, but yes, 'assembled' can mean various things. Whatever parts they touch in China also have to make a trip to Germany on the way to the consumer location, so there is transportation cost there too. The interesting question is whether the German facility retains a comparatuve advantage, and here I would conclude, if you ignore everything but performance, the inexpensive model is a better value.

If they add a port flare and tweeter wave guide to this, they might better align the price of the higher cost model with its relative performance in the lineup.

 

[richard12511]

Ask Neumann, they seem to have solved this problem.

Wow, you're right! I'm more curious now, though, as the port shape on the KH120 is similar to the port shape we see here. More impressive when you consider the 708p still has the problem, and it's much more expensive.

 

[maverickronin]

Ask Neumann, they seem to have solved this problem.

Wow, you're right! I'm more curious now, though, as the port shape on the KH120 is similar to the port shape we see here. More impressive when you consider the 708p still has the problem, and it's much more expensive.

Kali too. On the IN-8 and IN-5 at least. Not so much the LP-6

 

[hotdogsandwich]

Why would Adam be unable to maintain production standards at two locations? Race?

This is an ignorant comment. Do better.

 

[Tangband]

Interesting review.
This seems to be a really good loudspeaker. If one compares the distortion measurements, you can see some differences between Adam and Genelec at about the same price-point.

 

[KSTR]

The acoustical effect of cancellation notches get overrated because they look so bad in the frequency response and CSD plots.
With normal music material you'd have a hard time to ABX a difference between one and the same speaker with such a notch (emulated with a proper filter) and without. The reason is such deep high-Q notches need tens of cycles of a sine with constant amplitude to develop their depth (and then release a "reverb tail" when the sine stops abruptly. You simply don't hear it with the normal decaying spectrum even when you hit the right note.

EDIT: In general, a seemingly ragged frequency response in all the fine-grain is completely unrelated to how it sounds. A known worst case are coaxials measured (and listened too) direct on axis, as the total symmetry emphasizes irregularities, a very inappropriate magnifiyng glass.
IHMO, these high resolution plots should be forbidden to be published as people will get them wrong and fussing about it.

Further, cancellation notches is one of the things we are so accustomed to, basically our whole sound source distance judgments in everyday life is based on it to a big part so we just don't bother (even though it is different than a resonance-based cancellation). If we did, the floor bounce of speakers that is ususally very strong would totally spoil our listening experience... which it obviously does not.

 

[KSTR]

, as the port shape on the KH120 is similar to the port shape we see here.

Only from the outside.The Neuman port is not a classic port at all, rather it has a clever degeneration (controlled leakage) to make it look like a distributed lenght port, acoustically, plus it does the same for leakage signal entry from the inside of the port.

 

[daftcombo]

The reason is such deep high-Q notches need tens of cycles of a sine with constant amplitude to develop their depth (and then release a "reverb tail" when the sine stops abruptly. You simply don't hear it with the normal decaying spectrum even when you hit the right note.

That sounds like a convincing assertion to me, but with electronic music, such "long tones" are possible.

 

[KSTR]

@daftcombo , Of course I will not say that this flaw is excusable and completely irrelevant. Competent design should avoid the issue alltogether.
It just gets way too much exposure. And in practical usage it is irrelevant. Have you ever listened to your speakers in your room with a very slow sine sweep (worst case here is L=R, mono feed)? There is so much cancelling and image shifting going on that a speaker flaw in that regard is completely drowned.

 

[daftcombo]

@daftcombo , Of course I will not say that this flaw is excusable and completely irrelevant. Competent design should avoid the issue alltogether.
It just gets way too much exposure. And in practical usage it is irrelevant. Have you ever listened to your speakers in your room with a very slow sine sweep (worst case here is L=R, mono feed)? There is so much cancelling and image shifting going on that a speaker flaw in that regard is completely drowned.

I haven't, but it is interesting and I will try it.

But I listen to a lot of electronic musics, and on some tracks I can detect problems with speakers.
For instance, the first notes of this track sound weird on a pair of floorstanders I have but not on Aria 906 :

https://knekelhuis.bandcamp.com/track/a1-dark-star-ixtlan

 

[FeddyLost]

It just gets way too much exposure. And in practical usage it is irrelevant.

I'd like to see how one would mix some flute, clarinet or violin with such notch. It's not even in overtones range.
It's a monitor speaker after all. Monitor designer might sacrifice a lot, but not a reasonably flat FR, i think.

 

[dfuller]

It does, their directivity is dropping between 2-6 kHz due to their too small waveguide in comparison with their newer cheaper siblings with a larger one. Luckily for Adam the small 5" model was tested, on their larger models the problem becomes even more obvious, their A series is simply long outdated compared to their newer S and T models.

Huh, so I'm not losing my mind then.

There's more to it. T5V has plastic cone that has very low Q breakup starting from little over 1kHz. A5X has carbon composite cone that is more rigid and by that pistonic in intended pass band. Plastic cone is usually very VERY poor choice for midrange clarity. There are tricks (Dynaudio tries to work around it for decades) but not in this price range.

More rigid, but also not as well damped, so...

The second factor is cone breakup, IMHO. This cone (more exactly, the dustcap) has strong unsupressed resonances. A third factor is the tweeter distortion near it's XO point.

I can see the cone breakup a bit in the per-driver shots up in the stopband.

A8X is not a good speaker, it is boom/zing party box style. One simply cannot match a hard-coned 8" to an AMT without severe directivity issues, plus it has even more bass hump than other ADAM's. Plus the distortion (even more on the tweeter which is forced to XO lower here).

That'd track. The v-shape is pretty mild here but I'd imagine it gets more severe as you go up in woofer size, and I'd imagine that cone starts to misbehave lower in the stopband too.