News Talk ADAM: 10 Years Young 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. 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… It’s 10 years since it’s ADAM <strong>Audio</strong> 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. <strong>Audio</strong> and we have <strong>Media</strong> spoke with companies in the ADAM’s founder, US and LA, one Klaus Heinz. recently founded in the UK, and another <strong>Audio</strong> <strong>Media</strong>: 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 trans<strong>for</strong>mer. This is a Klaus Heinz, founder of ADAM <strong>Audio</strong>. 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 <strong>for</strong> 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 <strong>for</strong> ADAM was the introduction of a model called the A7, which sells <strong>for</strong> 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 per<strong>for</strong>mance, 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 be<strong>for</strong>e you can really judge a speaker. This is unlucky <strong>for</strong> a designer who wants a clear result, but on the other side, it’s a chance <strong>for</strong> 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 <strong>for</strong> ADAM in the UK. Specifically this involved the creation of ADAM <strong>Audio</strong> UK, a new company headed up by one Kevin Bent, and now the exclusive representative of ADAM <strong>Audio</strong> in the UK. � ADAM <strong>Audio</strong> GmbH, Berlin, Germany � +49 30 8630097 0 � www.ADAM-audio.de � ADAM <strong>Audio</strong> UK � +44 (0)1992 525670 � uk-info@ADAM-audio.com
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