In this on ‘tested’ article, Julian Rodgers auditions the ADAM S3V and finds that fits his way of working better than he could have anticipated.

The ADAM Audio S series are the top tier of the ADAM product line and the nice thing about flagship products is that when the design goal shifts away from value, everything gets that little bit easier. DSP, Class D amplification and computer-aided design have all helped improve the quality of cheap monitors enormously but there is an unavoidable element of mechanical engineering which comes into building quality loudspeakers which will always be expensive. There is no longer a necessary connection between things being cheap and them necessarily being nasty but expensive and nice are natural companions!

The topline for these monitors is for around £4,000 a pair you get 32Hz-50KHz and a max SPL of 124dB from a substantial but still relatively compact 3-way monitor - put it this way, you can lift them on your own but you might put your back out! So we have the very attractive proposition of monitors, which can offer full bandwidth reproduction and go as loud as you could sensibly want. What else is there to say?

As it turns out quite a bit but let’s deal with the basics first. All that level is provided via 3-way amplification, so far, so normal. What is less normal and the first thing which caught my eye is that the bass and mid drivers are powered by 500W and 300W class D amplifiers respectively but the S-ART folded ribbon tweeter is powered by a 50W class A/B amplifier. The advantages of a class D amplifier include efficiency and at the bottom end this is very desirable, cone loudspeakers are desperately inefficient at reproducing low frequencies and plentiful class D power really helps with this.

The folded ribbon tweeter design is inherently efficient, having as it does, a mechanical advantage over pistonic drivers and this A/B design can provide suitable amplification for the folded ribbon tweeter which can reproduce frequencies up to 50KHz, though I’ll have to take their word for that! Interestingly though the S5 models use an improved class D design for the tweeter.

So we have plenty of power on tap. What about that frequency response? I have to say that I’d be much happier if ADAM gave a tolerance for their quoted frequency responses. In my test, I concluded that the S3Vs are flat to 40Hz, but things disappear fast over the next half octave and by 32Hz there’s not much happening at all. Looking at the frequency plot on the ADAM website confirmed what I was hearing. At 50Hz things haven’t even begun to tail off but -3dB looks to be at 40Hz and 32Hz looks like it’s about 15dB down. The bass performance is really excellent and below 40Hz I’m not going to quibble. This is good so why quote 32Hz without a tolerance to specify what you mean?

Where does all this admirably flat frequency response come from anyway? The S3V has a 9” bass driver, a 4” midrange driver which is a dome/cone hybrid and the top end is catered for by the aforementioned S-ART tweeter. The crossover frequencies between these are 250Hz and 3KHz.

ELE Bass Driver

The 9” bass diver is a thing of beauty. It is constructed of Hexacomb which is a sandwich material of Nomex honeycomb sandwiched between layers of Kevlar. Given these two materials, I’d assume this driver to be fireproof and bulletproof! The honeycomb core for lightness and the Kevlar for rigidity makes an excellent material for a loudspeaker cone. The striking thing about the bass driver is its huge roll surround. This is part of what makes this driver so good at what it does.

Bass frequencies require a lot of air to move to create them and this can be achieved in one of two ways: Either have a big driver, or multiple small drivers, displacing a large volume of air courtesy of their larger surface area, or have a smaller driver move a long way in and out to displace the same amount of air. To really shift some volume large drivers up to 15” are commonplace but a large driver is, well… large. To get an acceptable bass performance from a smaller package you can move the driver further in and out, properly referred to as “excursion”.

The issues with long excursions are that to move further the driver has to move faster. Higher velocities can introduce issues but another significant issue is that movement has to be symmetrical and as well as the action of the air in the semi-sealed enclosure behind the speaker behaving differently under compression as is does when being stretched or “rarefied”, the speaker surround is by no means guaranteed to behave identically in the forwards and backwards directions. The mechanical suspension of the ELE driver in the S3V is designed to travel further while staying under control and importantly without being too soft so as to allow the excursions to become too great under high SPLs. Feeling the material it is stiffer than I expected.

I did briefly have a pair of S3Hs on loan, the horizontal version of these monitors which have dual 7” bass drivers. I actually ended up preferring the S3V in spite of the S3H’s greater complement of bass drivers but we’ll get to why that was later. The midrange and HF drivers on the H and the V are identical and the midrange driver is interesting as it confuses a question I’ve wondered about for a while. Do I prefer dome or cone midrange drivers? I used to think I preferred domes but the excellent Dynaudio Core 3 ways made me sit up and pay attention as they were so good. The DCH midrange driver found on the S3 confuses this (actually rather futile) question because it sits halfway between a dome and a cone. It seeks to combine the best characteristics of each and I can confirm that it handles the crucial three and a half octaves between 200 and 3K admirably. 200Hz is unusually low for a midrange driver. For example, the Dynaudio Core 59 crosses over to its LF driver at 385Hz and even the mighty ATC SCM45s cross over at 380. The midrange on these monitors is very tidy.

S-ART Tweeter

The HF is the part of ADAM monitors, which is markedly different to the majority of monitors on the market and the folded ribbon ART tweeter is probably what ADAM are best known for. I like the sound of this type of driver. Some people are suspicious of them but all I can say is try them as I’ve never found them anything other than revealing and well behaved. They do present transients in a slightly different way to dome tweeters and whether or not you like this presentation is definitely one of those questions you’ll have to figure out for yourself. The main thing I’d recommend is to try a pair and preferably try them in a way in which you can judge them on what you hear rather than what you expect.

The S3V is a 3-way monitor which occupies what is usually described as “Midfield’. I’ve always been a little confused by this description as the distinction between nearfield (or more correctly close field) monitoring and the very large, usually soffit-mounted monitors which used to be a feature of nearly every commercial studio is easy to understand. To minimise the influence of a less than ideal room, using smaller monitors closer to the listener allows the audio reaching the listener to be arriving from within the “critical distance” at which the level of reflected sound is equal to or less than the level of direct sound. To put it simply, if you’re close enough to the speakers, you don’t hear much of the room.

Midfield seems to mean big nearfields. There might well be issues with arrival times for drivers at different points in space if you work too close to large monitors but frankly, that’s the monitoring equivalent of sitting inches from a 50” TV. You don’t need to do any maths to figure it out. That said, you have to recognise that if you’re working in a tiny studio and you’re 3 feet from your monitors you should probably be looking at some small two ways but you probably didn’t need me to tell you that.

Sound

Enough of the package, how do they sound? In a word, really really nice. More specifically they have the perceived effortlessness which you always notice when you move up a division in terms of size and quality. This is a great feeling while it lasts but unfortunately, the buzz is short-lived and equally, unfortunately, there is always a bigger, more expensive pair of speakers…

This effortlessness is to be expected when using monitors well within their comfort zone as these will be in a typical project studio. We’ve all experienced the surprise of only realising exactly how loud you are running a nice set of monitors when you turn to speak and realise you can’t be heard. Headroom is plentiful and everything sounds easy until you start to push things louder than is advisable for sensible use.

Tonally the word which comes to mind is clarity and transparency. Performing a 3 way ABC test between these and two other, less capable, monitors revealed an absence of the boxy midrange colour in both of the others which feels like a lack of congestion in the sound of the S3Vs. Interestingly both of these other two monitors are respectable models, which don’t sound congested or boxy until they are compared directly against something rather better.

The top-end presentation of the ADAM tweeter is distinctive and until I’d spent time with them I’d always assumed “distinctive” to be a bad thing. This isn’t the case. They are different but sound very good indeed. The word I’d use is sharp but that might suggest harshness. I mean sharp in the sense of focused. A favourite test for the ability to resolve high-end detail is a tambourine. With most conventional dome tweeters tambourines blur into a “shhh” of noise. On these, you can hear the jingles hitting. Nice!

The midrange is perhaps a little smooth. It sounds great but the bumps and corners of vocals don’t stick out in quite the same way as I know them to on certain tracks. Whether this means they are getting enough scrutiny from these monitors is hard to say, which makes me think that if this smoothness in the midrange is really there, it’s not enough to worry about.

The bottom end is ample and well-controlled. One of the alternative monitors was a sealed box design, I like their tight bass performance, and the bass of the S3V stops and starts with every bit as much agility as the sealed box does. It goes right down low and doesn’t make a fuss at any point getting down there.

Conclusion

The conclusion here is going to be a little dull, the S3V is a properly built monitor, which sounds great but quality costs and while you can get most of the way to this kind of performance for less, there are some compromises, which can only be got around by doing things that cost money. Things like properly constructed cabinets, high-quality amplifiers and substantially constructed drivers are hard to do for less and when the target price for a product is enough to accommodate these, the results show.

Whether or not a monitor like the S3V is the right choice for you depends on your particular circumstances. In my case, these are large for my space but working around 5 feet away from them presented no issues. I wouldn’t recommend going in much closer.

The most interesting conclusion I reached was about having the monitors fit your space. The significant point was far more practical than any concerns about using midfield monitors in a nearfield application. I work with a standing desk and with 110cm stands (the tallest commonly available without spending quite a lot) the S3H were positioned too low for a standing configuration. The added height of a portrait orientation brought the tweeters exactly to my standing ear height - perfect!

This point, which is very specific to my situation, illustrates something really important. Having monitors which fit well with me working in my space is far more important than a couple of dB extra SPL or a few extra Hertz at the bottom end. Having tried both, I think the S3H is a marginally better monitor but not by enough to make me think it would be a better choice for me than the S3V.

Alternatives at this price are surprisingly difficult. Of monitors I have first-hand experience of the closest in price would be the Core 47, an excellent monitor but rather different. A better alternative from the same series would be the Core 59, a fantastic monitor but significantly more expensive in the UK. Looking at other vertical 3 way monitors the same issue seems to come up with the Focal Trio 6 Be being the closest competitor to the ADAM in terms of form factor, specs and price. But it's when comparing the competition rather than the other models in the ADAM line that you see just how good value the S3V really is.