Katherine_K
Member
ecoustics has a review up of the ATC SCM20ASL, the British active standmount, at 10,999 dollars a pair. Their summary is the one ATC always gets: built like a tank, unforgiving, world-class. They don't publish measurements in the piece, so I'm not going to pretend I know how it behaves off axis or how low it really goes.
What I want to talk about instead is what active designs do to a home cinema plan, because this comes up every time someone falls for a pair of ATCs or Genelecs and then starts thinking about surrounds. Active means the amplification is matched to the drivers by the people who designed them, and no amount of amp shopping on your end will improve or ruin that. For two channel that's a clean answer. For a room where you eventually want a centre and surrounds, it gets awkward fast.
Two things bite. First, every speaker needs mains power where it stands, so a centre under the screen and surrounds on the side walls all need outlets or trunking, and that is a wall-chasing job in most houses. Second, timbre matching. Passive systems let you buy the matching centre years later at whatever the used market offers. With a range like this the matching active centre is not a few hundred quid, and mixing an active front pair with passive surrounds means your processor is now dealing with two very different gain structures and you're setting levels by hand.
None of that makes them a bad buy. It makes them a two channel buy that you should not assume will grow into a 5.1 later. Anyone here actually running active fronts in a multichannel room, and how did you solve the centre?
What I want to talk about instead is what active designs do to a home cinema plan, because this comes up every time someone falls for a pair of ATCs or Genelecs and then starts thinking about surrounds. Active means the amplification is matched to the drivers by the people who designed them, and no amount of amp shopping on your end will improve or ruin that. For two channel that's a clean answer. For a room where you eventually want a centre and surrounds, it gets awkward fast.
Two things bite. First, every speaker needs mains power where it stands, so a centre under the screen and surrounds on the side walls all need outlets or trunking, and that is a wall-chasing job in most houses. Second, timbre matching. Passive systems let you buy the matching centre years later at whatever the used market offers. With a range like this the matching active centre is not a few hundred quid, and mixing an active front pair with passive surrounds means your processor is now dealing with two very different gain structures and you're setting levels by hand.
None of that makes them a bad buy. It makes them a two channel buy that you should not assume will grow into a 5.1 later. Anyone here actually running active fronts in a multichannel room, and how did you solve the centre?
