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