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Adam S2V Studio Monitor Review

Hiten

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NEWBIE POST :
I understand and agree the use of DSP in Studio Monitors. But some ATC Monitors do not use DSP. Ideal would be to give consumers control of things. Like making the High fidelity drivers, then fine tune with DSP having option to bypass it with regular passive component based crossover. Having a bypass option for amplification would be icing on the cake for typical home users.
I wonder why there are no Speakers with specialised active crossover+amp packages ?
Regards.
 

andreasmaaan

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@Lolito how about we make a deal?

If you can pass the test in the OP of this thread, and prove that you can hear the difference between an original recording and one that has been passed through 8 x AD and 8 x DA conversions, I'll promise to accept that maybe you can hear the difference between an original recording and one that's passed through one AD/DA conversion.

What do you say?
 

majingotan

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I wonder why there are no Speakers with specialised active crossover+amp packages ?

Because in the Pro market, sound engineers need fine tuning. That's where DSP excels in that purpose. You can design the best analog crossover and amp, but they can still have poor response in a specific room, and don't forget the spinorama measurements where DSP will typically perform much better than analog off-axis. With DSP, you can fine tune that along with room treatment and get ruler flat response that analog can only dream of in alternate universe.
 
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amirm

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NEWBIE POST :
I understand and agree the use of DSP in Studio Monitors. But some ATC Monitors do not use DSP. Ideal would be to give consumers control of things. Like making the High fidelity drivers, then fine tune with DSP having option to bypass it with regular passive component based crossover. Having a bypass option for amplification would be icing on the cake for typical home users.
I wonder why there are no Speakers with specialised active crossover+amp packages ?
Regards.
The JBL M2 is that way. DSP and amplification is outside. That has allowed people to build their own versions of those.
 

Joachim Herbert

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This was an interesting discussion about this (hope it's okay to post a link to another site):

https://www.forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=28649

Money quote from post #62 of the thread mentioned above: "If you compare excellent old-school monitors like the Neumann, PSI and HEDD with digital speakers like the Genelec Ones or ADAM S via analog inputs, it's not a level playing field: where possible, you have to deliver them AES-direct, or you're killing them."
 

Juhazi

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NEWBIE POST :
I understand and agree the use of DSP in Studio Monitors. But some ATC Monitors do not use DSP. Ideal would be to give consumers control of things. Like making the High fidelity drivers, then fine tune with DSP having option to bypass it with regular passive component based crossover. Having a bypass option for amplification would be icing on the cake for typical home users.
I wonder why there are no Speakers with specialised active crossover+amp packages ?
Regards.

Besides JBL M2 we have DIY. Not too many people (be pro or consumer) are willing to learn to play with crossovers and multiple amps. I guess most pro installations use the M2 with suggested expensive xo and amps.

Do It Yourself, and you can use any combination of drive units, dacs, dsp, amplifiers and even cables! You can design and build it totally by yourself, follow a recipe, buy a kit or use a factory-made multiway loudspeaker bypassing it's passive crossover. Of course you must learn how to do it well.

Hypex FA boards have dac, dsp and amps on a single board, but software is a bit tricky in the beginning

https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/ etc. internet forums are an endless resource!
 

KSTR

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As for AMT vs. dome tweeter, today I would agree neither design principle has significant advantages over the other. Any skilled DIYer or industry professional could take, say, the S2V cabinet and electronics and fit some suitable today's catalog dome driver and make it measure and sound just as good (or better said, very similar) as with the original AMT. Back in the day when Mr. Heinz pioneered the small size non-dipole AMT tweeters it seemed to have advantages, though. Let's call it a valid design alternative that hit the soft spot of many listeners... which does not necessarily mean it performed technically text-book perfect.

Analog vs. digital processing inside a monitor, this is an endless debate. Personally I would always favor well-implemented digital given the power and flexibility of today's DSP-chips and modules plus AD/DA converters, though analog is structurally less complex, therefore easier to design and implement and tends to be more robust.
For a small-size manufacturer, the choice of processing domain may not be driven by pure technical reasons.
 

Soniclife

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I wonder why there are no Speakers with specialised active crossover+amp packages ?
There are, as well as the M2 mentioned Linn and Naim have offered their speakers with external crossovers for a long time, and there are a small number of speakers that can be made active with DSP crossover using Linn or Devialet electronics. Plus a screwdriver is all you need to remove the internal passive crossover from a lot of speakers, to activate externally.
 

Joachim Herbert

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I am running my living room setup all digital (well, almost) from a roon server via p3/digione into a pair of Adam S3V. digione and S3V are connected by a funk casa-t that handles spdif to AES/EBU adaption to the left speaker. The right speaker is daisychained via . Volume control is via roon. I could not be happier.

I do not use the Adam DSP for anything but crossover and anything Adam baked into the code. Room correction is done in roon based on REW measurements. In fact I do only one very steep and narrow correction to get rid of a room mode around 42 hz.

The S3V uses two icepower amps for bass and midrange and an AB amp for treble. Midrange is handled by a big dome speaker (like Neumann and atc). I think they use the AB amp to have extended treble response.

The greatest improvement to this setup yet was adding an acoustic curtain to cover a blank wall with window behind my listening place.
 

Andreas007

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Personally I would always favor well-implemented digital given the power and flexibility of today's DSP-chips and modules plus AD/DA converters (...)

The well-implemented is the point. How to know without measuring? Amirs work shows us that we can‘t trust everyone on the market.
 

edechamps

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I do agree with @Lolito on one thing: the whole idea of feeding analog into the speaker and then having it go through an ADC → DSP → DAC just seems weird. Not saying it will cause audible issues, just weird from a signal chain perspective. It's more complicated than just going the obvious, cleaner, simpler route of digital input → DSP → DAC, and because of the additional moving parts there are increased risks that something will go wrong along the way. (Especially with regard to gain staging and noise.)

That being said, if the manufacturer decided to provide analog inputs, then it's the manufacturer responsibility to ensure they work just as well as the digital inputs. After all, it's not like properly integrating an ADC is hard, or expensive. If the analog input has a problem that makes it perform significantly worse than the digital input, and that causes anomalies to show up on @amirm's measurement, then the blame rests solely on the manufacturer's shoulders for not putting enough care into the analog conversion.
 
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LTig

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Look mate, my dacs are a khadas, and the other two are two pieces of shit that can be smelt from miles away; macbook dac and dell monitor dac. I can compare them blind folded, upside down, and whatever you like. But dog shit is dog shit, and will always be dog shit. And still, they are 3 dacs and sound very different. So would be nice to write here with more property, a dac is a very wide range of devices. Now if you compare 5 different dacs of 300$ each and you tell me they sound the same in a blind test, well mate, I will tell you something; that water is wet, and more news at 11 o'clock...
Uh huh.
 

Joachim Herbert

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I do agree with @Lolito on one thing: the whole idea of feeding analog into the speaker and then having it go through an ADC → DSP → DAC just seems weird.

Not really, apart from that the speakers reviewed here go digital > dsp > dac(s). If you opt to do crossover in the digital domain and are fed analog signal, there has to be AD-conversion.

Also, they seem to measure quite well as a package, althogh they are fed an analog signal.

Part of this discussion reminds me of the powered vs. passive speakers debate, where it was and still is argued that you need flexibility in choosing amps and cables. Oh well.
 

Hiten

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It's more complicated than just going the obvious, cleaner, simpler route of digital input → DSP → DAC, and because of the additional moving parts there are increased risks that something will go wrong along the way. (Especially with regard to gain staging and noise.)
Not sure but this reviewed monitor also has USB input which I suppose can avoid inbuilt ADC.
- - - - - -
Didn't knew some Linn and Naim had external crossover. Had heard about JBL M2 and was my dream system posted here (though I wrote it in jest as I cant afford it :))
Best regards
 

maty

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The S3V uses two icepower amps for bass and midrange and an AB amp for treble. Midrange is handled by a big dome speaker (like Neumann and atc). I think they use the AB amp to have extended treble response...

Are you sure?

BTW, KEF LS50W uses class AB 30 watts with the tweeter (and class D 200 watts with woofer).

You are right.

https://www.adam-audio.com/en/serie-s/s3v/
The S3V’s built-in amplification is generously specified, comprising Class D units for the bass and mid-range drivers (500 W and 300W RMS respectively) and a 50 W Class A/B amplifier for the S-ART tweeter.
 

Joachim Herbert

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Not sure but this reviewed monitor also has USB input which I suppose can avoid inbuilt ADC.

Not sure what you are referring to. There is a AES/EBU input for exactly that purpose. Amir just did not use it.
 

Hiten

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Pardon. Didn't paid attention.
So I suppose whatever interface one uses their differences will be oveshadowed by speaker measurements data.
 

Ilkless

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Can't you just eq them? I'm really looking at the type 07 as well. How would you say the sweet spot is on them?

Noticeably smaller than Focal and Genelec when all 3 were placed on the same stand. HEDD's Lineariser will EQ it out probably - I forgot to ask the dealer to switch in the lineariser. But the Type 05 has been measured by a third-party and it's not very pretty off-axis, so I'm not holding my breath on the Type 07, which has the added difficulty of a larger woofer. Plus there are several narrow nulls that I venture, are related to the screwheads exposed in the waveguide.

M 02 Free Field Response.png

M 15 Asse Fuori Asse.png

M 24 Polare Filled Contour.png
 

2020

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Noticeably smaller than Focal and Genelec when all 3 were placed on the same stand. HEDD's Lineariser will EQ it out probably - I forgot to ask the dealer to switch in the lineariser. But the Type 05 has been measured by a third-party and it's not very pretty off-axis, so I'm not holding my breath on the Type 07, which has the added difficulty of a larger woofer. Plus there are several narrow nulls that I venture, are related to the screwheads exposed in the waveguide.

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Huh, I guess that is disappointing, but it's hard to have it all in the sub 1000 category. I'm just a lowly nobody who plans on ruining them with Sonarworks after.
 
D

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Thanks for the explanations, now I understand them and I believe them. I also understand that, if speakers are reviewed using analog input, this speaker should be reviewed the same way, so it's the same starting point and a decent comparison can be made. Still, understanding how they work, if I ever decide to buy something similar, I would feed them with the AES input only, for non audible philosophical reasons, I guess. But yes, many of you have pointed out that the dsp in speakers have a lot of advantages and zero audible disadvantages.

I also understand by the several opinions expressed here and elsewhere, that active speakers system it's in a way a simpler and cheaper way to get good audio from speakers, rather than passive+amp, although I also know that that's another large debate that I don't want to enter, and I know in abbey road they have some passive B&W with amps, etc... etc... Good.

I just hope this kind of technology gets cheaper and/or more widespread. I also understand that speakers placement and room characteristics are still a huge part of the sound so, gotta check that before doing any upgrade. Thanks again.
 
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