Your thoughts about ATC loudspeakers

I’ve happily lived with a pair of ATC scm300A towers for the last 12 years. There really is nothing like a pair of large active speakers in a large room, able to crank up the volume to over 110db at the listening position 20ft from the speakers. They don’t just produce music, they create a complete musical event, whether at rock stadium levels or at more modest levels. Given room to breathe, they image surprisingly well for such a wide baffled speaker, giving a spectacularly realistic central image with sound emanating well past the speaker boundaries. Depth is very good, but not outstanding. Musicality is stunning providing they are fed by quality sources, I use an EmmLabs transport/dac feeding an Ayre KXR 20 preamp. But after 12 years with these babies, I feel the urge to try something else. I tried a pair of passive Vivid g2’s, but they surprisingly sounded totally underwhelming in my room, perhaps the Spirits would do the job, but they actually sounded rather clinical and fatiguing even with Ayre MXR20 or Bryston 28b3 monoblocks. So where next, well, in a few weeks I’ve got a pair of the ATC’s direct competitors in for a home dem, a pair of PMC MB2 XBD actives, they’ve only got twin 12” bass drivers vs the ATC’s twin 15” units, but I’ll be interested in whether the transmission line bass loading of the PMCs vs ported for the ATC’s competes. I’ve never heard a TL speaker, so this is gonna be interesting. Similar tweeters, similar mid units, but totally different bass loading. I’ll keep you posted

Go active! ATC speakers are wonderful at high volumes but they are not good at low volumes. Passive versions are even worse. If you want to have passive speakers I would check out PMC twenty.5 series. Phenomenal tweeter and a very fast transmissonline bass. They do low volumes much better. The ATC SCM40 doesn't have much quality bass, 2-way PMC would be the better choice in my opinion. If you go active consider the all digital GRIMM Audio LS1be. Best speaker I have heard with a good price / performance ratio - again better at lower volumes than ATC.

My passive SCM40 V2 passive sound great at low to moderate volumes and render bass very accurately and powerfully down to the lower limit of the woofers. I must have bought a good pair. 

;)

I am aware that I am responding to an old post. But I wanted to share my experience with ATC SCM19 v2 speakers. I have had JBL, Klipsch, KEFs (including bookshelf LS50), B&W and DALI over the years. But these ATC 19 speakers are at different league all together. I am running them (95% of the time) with  Benchmark DAC3 > Benchmark AHB2 (100watts). I have a small listening area, and speakers are placed 3 inches from the front wall. They are extremely musical, fantastic sound stage (although limited in my smaller setup), non-fatiguing and accurate sounding speakers I ever had. I listen to classical, vocals, rock and these speakers can play them all the way it should be played. Tonally they sound extremely balanced (although sometimes, I do get a bit of harshness at higher frequencies).

These speakers play very well with my 100watts amp (even at lower volumes), but are able to produce a bit more fuller sound with amps with higher wattage. I use them with my other  amps - such Parasound A21 & Cambridge Audio 851W. But I play them most of the time with my 100 watts amp, and never felt anything lacking from the music.

Just my 2 cents. 

@ssnkssnk   

Welcome to the forums. You can display photos of your system setup on this site. Harshness will be source dependent. The speakers are very revealing of the source. CD loudness wars have resulted in quite a lot of harsh sounding pop/rock.