Mint condition and in black. Chances are a lot of the albums you listen to were monitored and mixed on these. A caveat is that these are as neutral as speakers can possibly be and will ruthlessly reveal problems in source or your playback chain. Used as rears in a 5.1 setup. Retailed for $3500US. For imaging, soundstaging and timbre it's about as good as it gets. Note that these are far superior to Proac, B&W 805s and any Totem monitor and at a fraction of the price.
If your system is up to it nothing will sound this good.
$900.
Please note they are extremely heavy for their size at 21 pounds each.
ATC speakers are still essentially hand constructed. The mid/bass driver is unique and the midrange dome driver is stitched or mechanically attached on top of the bass driver and mechanically crossed over. The dome looks a lot like a really big tweeter on top of and in the middle of the bass driver. It is a rather ingenious creation.
The SCM10s are destined eventually for Triantafillou's home studio, which is currently under construction. "In designing and building my home studio with personal and outside projects in mind, I wanted to have a highly-accurate monitoring system " he explains. Listening to the ATC monitors installed at Columbia University, he recalls, "Obviously the SCM10s are a smaller monitor, so they're not going to produce the lower octave, but the detail, depth, and imaging of the speakers is amazing. I put on Peter Gabriel's "So" record, and all of a sudden I could hear reverbs that I'd never heard. It was really quite striking."
Fair point - I was being reserved and they are indeed excellent
speakers, possibly the best of their size in the world, the only real
competition I am aware of being the Sonus Faber Guarneri and the Wilson
WATT. Consider the relative prices and you'll see we're talking about a
remarkable speaker!
If you are compromised for space or you just can't bear speakers out in
the room, I don't believe the SCM10 can be beaten.
The tops in their size class. Second choice: Acoustic Energy 2 and B&W 805 (a tie IMO). An honest set of speakers that require the best amplification. Stewart was being reserved about the sound quality possible from these little guys - these are exceptional performers and I assume there are two reasons they are not even more popular" (1) Cost: they are not cheap and the proper amplification is not cheap either and (2) the truth can be cruel at times.
1 - Cost. They ARE cheap for their sound quality but they aren't very
big for what you pay. In the good ol' US of A, this is a serious black
mark.
2 - The truth can be cruel. ATC speakers are popular with recording
studios because they are (a) almost indestructible and (b) ruthlessly
revealing of poor recording techniques. These are not 'polite' speakers
in the B&W manner and will render many of your CDs unlistenable by
revealing to you that they are cr*p recordings! OTOH, with a good
recording they will take your breath away.
In my experience, there is no real comparison, either ATC model, the 10 or 20, is
significantly superior to the 805, with one important caveat, they do
not take prisoners. Feed an ATC speaker an inferior signal (be it the
fault of source or recording) and it will spit straight in your face!.
This of course is why they are so popular in studios. The B&W speakers
generally are much kinder to inferior recordings, the downside being
that they do not fully capture the fire and emotion of a really good
performance immaculately recorded.
