ATC SCM19 Bookshelf Speaker Review

[Frank Dernie]

It is an apples-to-apples comparison of 3" mid domes from the same era by 2 different companies, once linked by an OEM relationship. Moreover, identical 3" domes were used throughout the lineup of each brand. And when the comparison shows one brand having distortion so low that it can play 10 times louder before reaching the same level of distortion, I can't see how it's not a humiliation - especially when claims of an exceptional, transcendentally-good 3" dome are central to ATC's identity and sales pitch.

Has the owner of ATC sold your mother and sister into slavery or something?
Every time they are mentioned you churn out the same string of vitriol.

 

[Archsam]

Please can someone send Amir a pair of LS3/5A speakers for testing?

This is THE monitor standard that forms the foundation of the 'classic' BBC sound, which is beloved by many even today. If they are tested and the measurements are disappointing it will burst the reputation of the BBC monitor sound once and for all. It will for me at the very least.

I would have send my Harbeth P3esr in for testing already if I don't have to ship them from the UK.

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE IN AMERICA SEND AMIR THEIR LS3/5A?

 

[q3cpma]

"Another one bites the dust" playing in the distance

Has the owner of ATC sold your mother and sister into slavery or something?
Every time they are mentioned you churn out the same string of vitriol.

Well, hearing the same baseless bull everytime must get to be annoying. Especially on this place, there's tons of "appropriate" forums for talk about reputation and impressions.
Though I do understand that @Ilkless lives somewhere where ATC is very dominant and good pro brands very rare, so it may play a role.

 

[Dimifoot]

@amirm wasn't in a good mood today .

The ATC was expected to perform better, true, but we have seen worse. Performance score isn’t that bad.

Eq’ing the 600-1000hz range will improve overall performance a lot, and help with the resonance/distortion around 700hz.
You will have to use multi subs anyway, as with any speaker, so bass will be adjusted.

I am not suggesting that this ATC should be “recommended”, but headless is harsh.

 

[Objectivist01]

Strangely i find this satisfying. Many a times when i visit hifi stores ihear very mediocre sound whohc haa very huge price tags. And i always had seen lot of folks loving. I was always thinking if my idea of good sound is not upto their difficult to digest standards. Now i am relived. I never heard a ATC but PMC yes. And to me they were not at all impressive. I really want some harbeths to be measured now.!!

 

[Objectivist01]

@amirm wasn't in a good mood today .

The ATC was expected to perform better, true, but we have seen worse. Performance score isn’t that bad.

Eq’ing the 600-1000hz range will improve overall performance a lot, and help with the resonance/distortion around 700hz.
You will have to use multi subs anyway, as with any speaker, so bass will be adjusted.

I am not suggesting that this ATC should be “recommended”, but headless is harsh.

All that after spending 4k on it. I like the idea of it.

 

[daftcombo]

@amirm wasn't in a good mood today .

The ATC was expected to perform better, true, but we have seen worse. Performance score isn’t that bad.

Eq’ing the 600-1000hz range will improve overall performance a lot, and help with the resonance/distortion around 700hz.
You will have to use multi subs anyway, as with any speaker, so bass will be adjusted.

I am not suggesting that this ATC should be “recommended”, but headless is harsh.

That ATC costs ten times an ELAC DBR62 and plays worse. Would you really recommend it to a friend? Or recommend it to an enemy?

 

[test1223]

Hello,

The magic midrange dome is all cult of personality. Independent lab data shows it was obliterated by the contemporaneous Neumann dome, which can play 10dB (10 times louder as sound pressure level is logarithmic) before it distorts as much as the ATC dome. What a joke. To add to this humiliation, teardowns show that the Neumann dome has a much more compact footprint, allowing tighter centre-to-centre spacing. This certainly exposes ATC as a laughably backward brand capable of only designing large primitive drivers that still fail to reach the SOTA despite the size and weight penalty.

Sound and Recording aka Prof. Anselm Goertz is not completely independent from Neumann. He did some projects with Neumann and they knew each other. The measurements are accurate any way. Neumann also didn't build the dome chassie in house.

Max SPL in the mids is not an issue at all in these Studio monitors. A comparison of directivity or the lack of resonances or the inter modulation distortion at reasonable SPL should be much more of interest.

I "hype" about midrange domes is because of the directivity which essentially the crossover frequencies create.

Best
Thomas

 

[digititus]

 

[Objectivist01]

Now we need to see some spendors, dynaudios, harbeths.

 

[Koeitje]

Now we need to see some spendors, dynaudios, harbeths.

Harbeth was already tested, it didn't do too bad iirc but not the quality you'd expect for the price. Still much better than this for sure.

 

[Dimifoot]

All that after spending 4k on it. I like the idea of it.

I don’t know which speaker you are referring to, but the new ATC 19 available on the European market now is this one
http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/hi-fi/loudspeakers/entry-series/scm19/

As you can see is a completely different speaker, curved cabinet to start with. It costs around 2500€.

So what we have here is an old version of a speaker measured, price is irrelevant.

Would you really recommend it to a friend?

Please read carefully what I have written:

I am not suggesting that this ATC should be “recommended”, but headless is harsh.

 

[fredoamigo]

all this puts the previous results into perspective and especially when I look at Mads Buchardt's comments on the S400 which did not seem to be satisfied with the result ... ... mad look !
Here we have audio icons that are neglected and the S400s become a godsend.

 

[BYRTT]

Strangely i find this satisfying. Many a times when i visit hifi stores ihear very mediocre sound whohc haa very huge price tags. And i always had seen lot of folks loving. I was always thinking if my idea of good sound is not upto their difficult to digest standards. Now i am relived. I never heard a ATC but PMC yes. And to me they were not at all impressive. I really want some harbeths to be measured now.!!

Harbeth Monitor 30 was within first ten reviews, it scored a fine 5,31 in preference rating and sounded good in Amir's ears verse the 4,61 score of SCM19 in preference rating and less optimal performance in listening test.

 

[DSJR]

The LS3/5A isn't a good speaker for music and was quacked and fizzed up to better reproduce distortion and hiss in the broadcast program (in OB vans). It was a pig to make and calibrate and existing samples are guaranteed to be well off spec now I gather. It's loved because it's a 'BBC' speaker, the fans totally forgetting the BBC designed for their own use only...

As for ATC, I thank the good Lord the bass is too dry and damped. I so envy you lot with large rooms where larger speakers can be set up well clear of walls and floors so they can breathe, where all I get from typical porty boxes is BOOOOOOOOOM!!! irrespective of the amp or source used. The chosen response shape was obviously intended and not accidental I feel.

Thing is, so many small 'monitors' seemed once upon a time to be balanced more this way I think, with lifted upper mids and for us in smaller well furnished listening rooms it's something of a godsend as the bass is so taut, allowing closer to wall mounting (which ruins Harbeths for example if placed too near to walls with their less well damped bass and heavy port use). Compared to the general over-priced high end rubbish available in the UK market back then, ATC were an amazing upgrade for Linn-Naim owners (they still are and cheaper too) and a tear-jerking session with current spec 100A's brought it all back eighteen months ago - measurements be damned - and apart from the size, everything's been changed since the mid 90's when I had mine!!!!!

I have heard the floor standing 19A's and can confirm the leaner balance in these. In the sitting room/snug size room I heard them in they were perfect again, the boomy drone of other larger speakers I've heard in this room totally absent! (I've also heard Kii Three's in this room and they were similarly balanced and absolutely delightful at nearly three times the price).

The likes of Neumann and Genelec aren't available in domestic dealers over here and we have the likes of Kudos for the specialised Naim-owning fraternity and many models from Dynaudio (something for every taste and high price point, the pro actives kept well away I think). Maybe ATC's are falling behind these days in comparison (although as I've said, the drivers have been worked on over the years and last I heard, they were advertising for an engineer with DSP design experience) but given the chance, I'd have a pair of 40A's like a shot and forget this HiFi merry go round! Revel and relations just aren't marketed heavily over here and it's incredibly sad. A dealer friend of mine says PMC's are spoken about but nobody's heard of Revel

 

[sergeauckland]

Please can someone send Amir a pair of LS3/5A speakers for testing?

This is THE monitor standard that forms the foundation of the 'classic' BBC sound, which is beloved by many even today. If they are tested and the measurements are disappointing it will burst the reputation of the BBC monitor sound once and for all. It will for me at the very least.

I would have send my Harbeth P3esr in for testing already if I don't have to ship them from the UK.

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE IN AMERICA SEND AMIR THEIR LS3/5A?

Don't want to derail this thread, about ATC, but I just want to point out that the LS3/5A was never a standard monitor. It was developed for speech monitoring in restricted spaces like OB vans and small voice booths. It was never intended for music, and all the LS3/5As I saw at the BBC, and there were plenty, were mostly in offices, propped up on books or on filing cabinets and used for content monitoring, not quality monitoring.

What they do have is consistency, and the idea was that one could book a pair out of stores and any two regardless of serial number or production date would work together as a stereo pair.

One should definitely not judge the BBC sound (if there's such a thing) by the LS3/5A.

S.

 

[Vini darko]

Why run sealed with such a tiny woofer? It makes no sense its never going to work properly. I think 6.5" is the minimum for sealed preferably 8". Celestion had that figgered back in the 70's.

 

[AudioSceptic]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the original ATC SMC19 speaker. There is now a second variation with their in-house tweeter. This is the original which I call "V1." The V2 costs US 4,000 which I assume what the V1 cost. It was kindly sent to me by a member for testing.

The SCM19 is by far the heaviest bookshelf speaker I have tested. You or I should say I, could barely lift it up to the 5 foot high measuring platform. It clocks at whopping 40 pounds! Overall look of the unit is on the serious side with a damped industrial looking woofer with seemingly long travel capability:

View attachment 71803

My impression from feeling and picking up the unit was that this is going to be one dynamic speaker.

The back panel shows lack of port and dual binding posts:
View attachment 71804

Zooming in we see the pedigree of the speaker:

View attachment 71805

Designed and manufactured in Gloucestershire, England.

Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.

I used over 800 measurement point which was sufficient to compute the sound field of the speaker.

I usually use the tweeter center as the measurement axis. The manual for SCM19 states that the acoustic center is between the tweeter and woofer rings so I compensated for that by lowering the measurement center to be 4 centimetres lower. This made a tiny difference (likely due to size of the speaker and my measurement distance).

Spinorama Audio Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker can be used. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:

View attachment 71807

What??? The heck kind of response is this? Giant boost in midrange and lower treble?

On top of that we have directivity mismatch when the woofer hands the signal to the tweeter. The former's beam is narrowing while the tweeter's is wide resulting in off-axis sound in that region to have different tonality than direct. In a reversal fortunes, the off-axis looks more proper:

View attachment 71808

Putting the two together we get a predicted in-room response of:

View attachment 71809

We are going to have too little bass with a lot of mid-range and presence. Given how important bass is to our perception of fidelity (about one third), this seems like the wrong choice of response.

I expected the mean looking woofer and high price of the unit to result in very low distortion. But that was not accomplished either:

View attachment 71810

Here it is in absolute level:

View attachment 71811

The beam width (how wide the region with close tonality is) on the horizontal axis is on the low side at +- 50 degrees:

View attachment 71812

Here it is in 3-d diagram:

View attachment 71813

And vertical:

View attachment 71814

Lack of port removes one of the peaks in our impedance curve:

View attachment 71815

We see a "kink" in the impedance/phase graph at around 700 Hz indicating resonance. That is also the point of high distortion. It also shows up in CSD/waterfall display:

View attachment 71816

Speaker Listening Tests
You all keep asking me to listen to the speaker before measuring. So this time as the system was crunching the equations I did precisely that, fully biased on the incredible heft of the speaker and beefy speakers expecting to be blown away by the dynamics.

The "5 second" impression was an incredible presentation of high frequency notes. They sounded like they were jumping out of the speaker and reaching toward me. I thought, "oh yeh, this is going to be good!" Then the vocals came. Hmmm. They don't sound right. But yet, enough audiophile tracks. Let's queue up some bass heavy tracks.

What? Where is the bass? What is that woofer doing? It sure is not moving much. I turned up the volume but now the mids and highs were getting quite loud and annoying.

At this point I stop and get the measurements and see the lack of bass. So I pull up the EQ in my Roon player and put on my surgical outfit to fix what shouldn't need fixing. First thing I did was put in a low shelf to boost the bass:

View attachment 71819

That is filter Band 2. Was happy for 10 seconds until I turned up the volume and the woofer bottomed out! I thought for sure it could handle that 2 dB peak. But no, it was not happy at all.

Suspecting that the problem was deep bass, I dialed in Band 3 which cuts out the lowest bass registers. This has minimal impact on amount of bass but nicely eliminated the woofer from bottoming out (and getting seriously distorted).

Now we had a pleasant speaker. But hey, if am going to play speaker designer with equalization, why did I pay the factory $4,000???

Conclusions
ATC is another "PRO" company producing hi-fi speaker. My impression of any such company is that they would produce speakers that would have a neutral and balanced frequency response and hence tonality. I can't fathom how they would produce something like the SCM19. The results are so poor that I am suspecting my measurements must be wrong. But then the listening tests confirmed the same.

I read that the new version uses in-house tweeter. That seems like the wrong problem to try to solve. They should fix the woofer first.

Needless to say, I can not recommend the ATC SCM19 (version 1).

------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Drive nearly 200 miles today to drop off and pick up some gear to test from local members. Last I checked, cars are not free to run so please donate what you can using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

One of the most surprising and disappointing results yet. I've never owned any ATCs, or even heard any "properly", but I really, really, expected them to be top of the class. How could they put so much into that heavy build (which increases costs all the way from buying materials through to final dellivery to the customer), and yet get the basics so wrong?

 

[DSJR]

Harbeth was already tested, it didn't do too bad iirc but not the quality you'd expect for the price. Still much better than this for sure.

A TWENTY YEAR OLD (or there abouts) Harbeth was tested which was 'voiced' more like the odd BBC-Centric LS5/9 which it was intended to replace. Once the BBC went over to actives for much of their small moinitor needs, Harbeth largely corrected the balance and brought them progressively more up to date - around four generations now (30.1, 30.2, 30.2 Anniversary with added bling and now the just released 30.2 XD..

 

[Ilkless]

"Another one bites the dust" playing in the distance

Well, hearing the same baseless bull everytime must get to be annoying. Especially on this place, there's tons of "appropriate" forums for talk about reputation and impressions.
Though I do understand that @Ilkless lives somewhere where ATC is very dominant and good pro brands very rare, so it may play a role.

Yeah, the reputation deserves to be debunked. That said, ATC prices are the best anywhere I've seen. I can get the new SCM19 for a shade over 2k a pair, so almost half price, from an AD. But even 2k is hardly worth it if this performance persists in the new generation.