Iain Churches wrote:

------------------------

Phil Allison


Somewhere, I read an article about a musician (maybe) and
he was asked what his favourite gadgets were.

One on his replies was his Adams monitor speakers.

This seems to be a German company and the only thing I
can see is that they don't have grilles at the front
(so how do you keep the dust out ?). They seem to have
an unusual tweeter, not the usual cone arrangement.

Other than that, what is the difference between one
and a 'normal' speaker.


** There is a Wiki on nearly everything now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_monitor

This one is quite extensive.

I have just looked at the Thomann website. They seem to have the whole range. Yes they are expensive.

https://www.thomann.de/gb/search_dir.html?bf=&sw=adam


** Seems most models use their "ART ribbon tweeter" which turns out to be a resurrection of Oskar Heil's famous "Air Motion Transformer".

https://www.adam-audio.com/en/

See section headed "German Audio Engineering".

I had the opportunity to do some tests on one of Oskar's gadgets in the late 1980s. I used 4 cycle tone bursts and picked up the output with an AKG CK2 omni condenser mic and viewed it on a scope. Of course, I simply listened to sine waves at various frequencies too.

The strange contraption produced obvious, spurious outputs that were not part of the input. Harmonic and non harmonics of the input sine frequency as well as extra cycles and even whole bursts at frequencies above 10kHz.

IME most dome tweeters perform as well or better, good ones much better.

The tweeter part of a Quad ESL57 eats it for breakfast - I owned a pair at the time.

In a word "harsh".

Very.


..... Phil