I bought an Adam T5V and stuck it into service in my 7.4.4 Dolby Atmos system, replacing one of the JBL 305P MKIIs, the one in the center over the TV screen. It shares center channel duties with the front left and right JBLs, as part of an array of 3 speakers that focus a solid phantom center image at the middle of the screen, a technique that I first heard about from the Magnepan “tri-field center” setup. (I used Magnepans and Quads at home for nearly 40 years.) These are my findings.
Some further contextual information regarding this system: DSP is used to do level, EQ, phase and distance/time compensation. Every speaker and sub gets the full DSP treatment, and the JBLs and the Adam have DSP EQ applied to match the Klippel-derived “listening window” (LW) compensation curves that have been widely recommended for each, so this is NOT a raw, out of the box comparison. These are my real-world conditions and that tend to level the playing field significantly in terms of addressing some known issues with each design as best as possible, so they’re both delivering the most neutral spectral balance that I can conjure from each of them. The downside, if you can call it that, is that my final impressions ignore the affects of the resonance peaks and dips that are being compensated for. (Newsflash: the JBLs and the Adam, like most speakers, both have native resonances and other EQ non-linearities which require addressing.)
Another important caveat: in addition to rolling off below 80Hz for use with subwoofers, I PLUGGED THE BASS REFLEX PORTS IN ALL OF THE SATELLITE SPEAKERS IN THE SYSTEM, because I hate the internal cabinet resonances that escape from ports, even rear-mounted ones. I find them intolerable in most designs, including both of these. So often, bass reflex speakers that cover the midrange, as opposed to just bass, have a characteristic boxiness, a set of midrange colorations that remind me of big PA speakers. Plus, a port likes to literally “whistle” its own tune with a resonance or two in the mids around 600 Hertz give-or-take a few hundred depending on its dimensions. It’s all very distracting. I have always used subs at work and at home, and ideally the market would be flush with sealed cabinet satellites, but it isn’t, and to be fair that’s not the target market for these speakers anyway: they’re expected to provide a semblance of bass without a sub, so it’s a compromise. Well, the manufacturers have their agenda, and I have mine. So I plug the port and move on. This isn’t to fault the Adam, it just seems to be the nature of a ported box that’s loading a driver which has to operate up into the midrange.
I‘m a retired broadcast TV audio engineer, and a scientist, and I don’t feel comfortable using audiophile reviewer terminology, so my listening impressions will be disappointingly brief: I’ll just say that the T5V sounds slightly lower in distortion and seems to have punchier bass than the JBLs. The highs are particularly sweet and clean, and because of the seemingly lower midrange distortion, it can sometimes yield startlingly realistic human voice reproduction. That’s an acid test for me, and it’s something I had been missing when I gave up Magnepans and Quads. (I don’t miss the I
impossible-to-overcome room interaction issues inherent in planar dipoles.) The JBLs and the Adam both play adequately loudly for my purposes, seated in a typically-sized domestic room at about 2.5 meters away. But the Adam seems like it might be compressing dynamics less than the JBLs. They feel relatively a little cleaner, more “effortless” and dynamic than the JBL 305P MKII, especially for their size. I haven’t measured for that, though. End of listening impressions.
The T5V does seem to require 1 dB more input gain to play exactly as loudly (as measured with AudioTools) as a JBL 305P MKII when the unbalanced inputs are maxed out on each, before DSP, which doesn’t mean much. Everything in the room is running on CyberPower UPSes, fed by 2 different 15 amp breakers for adequate current delivery for everything on line, but the JBLs have all had to have their AC power ground pins floated with a “cheater plug” adapter to eliminate ground loops in this unbalanced system. (Don’t worry, everything is safe with no harmful voltages floating around anywhere in this setup. And in case you’re wondering, running all of the JBLs on a single breaker with nothing from the other breaker attached to them does not help the ground loop issue in any way. I tried that.) I never had that issue with outboard power amplifiers driving passive speakers here. The Adam T5V has been criticized by a few for having RFI (radio-frequency interference) issues and such, but it’s very well behaved in this installation, more so than the JBLs.
I was never bothered by the minimal amplifier hiss on the JBLs, it only being audible from about 15cm away for any of my units, (maybe I got lucky with all of the 15 units I bought?) but for what it’s worth this particular T5V is noticeably quieter.
I did some research on the larger Adam T7V and the T8V, and my takeaway is that the T5V, with its smaller woofer and smoother directivity may actually be the sweet spot in the lineup, especially if you’re running subwoofers, which I am, with a 4th-order Linkwitz-Riley high pass crossover at 80Hz on the satellites and a 2nd-order low pass on the subs at 120Hz (an overlap being required to address a null at 103 Hertz in my room.)
I just ordered a pair of T5Vs to put into front left and right channel service for this AV system.
