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News Talk
ADAM: 10 Years Young
ADAM Audio is one of the success stories in monitoring, with a growing reputation for exceptional quality at a sensible price.
Now, with 10 years under its belt, there’s new product, and a good excuse to delve into the reasons for that success…
It’s 10 years since it’s ADAM Audio
was created, and it’s still growing
strongly in a heavily populated
So, my partner and I started in 1999
to take the tweeter and put it into
some studio monitors. The first thing
market, even during these difficult to do was to go to the AES convention
economic times. ADAM marked in 1999, and within a few days, we had
this milestone recently both with customers, we had positive reactions
evening celebrations at the recent – we had Rupert Neve stopping by
Prolight + Sound show in Frankfurt, and saying “this is an excellent design,
and with the introduction of the young man,” – and I was 50 at that
brand new SX Series monitors. point in time.
The SX Series features a new tweeter From then on we tried to build
with X-ART technology, a new woofer up the international business
with HexaCone technology, new A/B immediately. We grew to, now 60
amps, and a frequency response of people, with a nice factory in Berlin,
35Hz to 50kHz. Audio
and we have
Media spoke with
companies in the
ADAM’s founder,
US and LA, one
Klaus Heinz.
recently founded in
the UK, and another
Audio Media: How
that is to address
did it all start?
the Chinese market.
Klaus Heinz: I
We have distributors
was intrigued by
in more than 50
speaker concept
countries and the
from Dr. Oskar Heil
overall business is
called the air motion
transformer. This is a
Klaus Heinz, founder of ADAM Audio.
still growing.
way of reproducing high frequencies AM: What makes ADAM different?
in a rather different way from what KH: I think the overall sound quality
you find with voice coil systems that is the number one issue why ADAM
drain 99.9% of the actual production is successful – why ADAM could enter
today. I constructed a tweeter with the German broadcast scene where
that principle, that seemed to have people are normally very conservative
very positive properties; it seemed to and looking for known brands, and
sound better – better transients – and still succeed simply because the
I thought this was enough to justify sound quality was so convincing.
the foundation of a company.
Also, during the ten years of
20
A U D I O M E D I A M A Y 2 0 0 9
putting the same tweeter in all our
models, we went down and down
in price. The big shift for ADAM was
the introduction of a model called
the A7, which sells for approx.
US$1,000 a pair… We now do more
than 1,000 pieces a month of this
model. And we introduced an even
cheaper model called A5 last year,
which is coming out now.
Besides this, I redesigned the core
of ADAM – the S-series monitors,
from the ground up. We now have
the new SX series. I have a new
tweeter that has spectacularly better
technical performance, such as 4dB
more efficiency, which is an awful lot
in the transducer business. There’s a
50kHZ real bandwidth (-3dB point),
which is extremely rare if achieved at
all from any other tweeter. And most
importantly, does it sound better?
Fortunately the reactions have been
as clear as they could be.
AM: What do you think makes a
person say one monitor sounds better
than another?
KH: We are in a subjective domain
here. There is no clear answer, of
course. You can have speakers A and B
in one room, and prefer A, and when
you go to the next room, you prefer B.
You might prefer A with one CD, but
with another CD, you prefer B.
Yet there is a canon of opinions, of
listening, of good guys with golden
ears, that say ‘this is a better speaker’,
whatever this physically means. If you
talk to each other, then you know this
model from this manufacturer does
that and that, and in most cases you
will agree. So the judgement comes
from many people’s opinions over a
period of time. You need both many
people, and you need a certain time
to elapse before you can really judge
a speaker.
This is unlucky for a designer who
wants a clear result, but on the other
side, it’s a chance for small companies
like us to succeed… The subjective
domain is important enough in our
business, that individual designers
like me can have success, and are not
victim to big companies.
Recently, things changed for ADAM in the
UK. Specifically this involved the creation
of ADAM Audio UK, a new company
headed up by one Kevin Bent, and now
the exclusive representative of ADAM
Audio in the UK.
� ADAM Audio GmbH, Berlin,
Germany
� +49 30 8630097 0
� www.ADAM-audio.de
� ADAM Audio UK
� +44 (0)1992 525670
� uk-info@ADAM-audio.com