ADAM S3Vs: Your Next Studio Monitors? 

I've been using the original A7 for 12 years. The key to these monitors is to have you ears at a height of the tweeter-LF driver midpoint. If your ears are on tweeter height you will get this impression. Also, when your ears are on the midpoint the tweeter is less harsh and it integrates with the rest of music much better.

I’ve tested the A5X and A7X too, but these 3-way S series are spot on imo.

@@danielbakker-eu i bought the s3h not long after i posted that comment, the new s series is so good yo! The low end is kinda tight and vintage voiced imo, the mid dome is to die for!

Same question

An interesting question. Ideally you’d be able to test both in your environment or head to a music store with a Pro Audio section and test them yourself. Personally I was very impressed with the Adams. I can’t make the choice for you tho, you have to hear both and decide!

I wish I could afford these..sooooo good!

Hey Daniel, love to hear this. I want to buy the S3v's and place them in my home studio which has a surface of 18 square meter. Are you happy with your subs in combination with them, because I want a sub too but don't know how needed it is or how much difference it will make? How do you experience it? I make dance music (Big room, melodic Progressive house) and just wonder if it is really that needed to have one subwoofer.

@@atalo The S3V’s have enough low end if you place them correctly in the room vs your listening spot to create great mixes for most situations. They roll of about 38 hz in my situation and the sub is not for more low end, but for extended low end down to 20 hz or so. Today i also will receive the Sub15 and will test one Sub15 vs two Sub12’s in my room. After testing and measuring i will decide if i’ll keep the Sub15 or the two Sub12’s. The trick with subs is not to set the crossover point at 85 Hz or so, but about 1.5 times the cut off frequency of the near/mid field monitors. For the S3V’s this is 32 Hz times 1.5 is 48 Hz. Besides this you also need to place the sub in fase with the S3V’s and set the volume level right vs the near/mid field monitors. Once set, you never need to change it again unless you change the placement. Adam Audio has a instruction video on this. The difference with and without a sub is huge imo, especially if you really want to manage and control your low end. Low end takes a lot of energy and is most difficult to represent and mix correctly. In most cases people listen music online with their phone or so and most people do not own high end speakers to listen music on. In these cases the deep low end won’t even be noticeable. But a wrong managed low end can definitely ruin your whole mix, even though you can’t hear it on most used devices. Therefore you want to know what’s going on in this frequency area and will a well placed and configured sub compliment your mid/near field monitors to get an linear frequency response from about 20 Hz up to 50.000 Hz in case of the Adam Audio.

@@danielbakker-eu Thank you so much for the fast answer, please let me know if you like your sub15 more. Do you think my room (18 square meter surface) is big enough for the S3v's? I think so with good placement, good acoustic treatment..

@@atalo I’ve tested the Sub15 with the S3V’s and this matches perfect with the S3V’s. The bottom end of the Sub15 is rock solid down to 20 Hz. How i did calibrate this setup as a starting point is using the main outs of my Antelope Satori monitor controller for the S3V’s and the separate Sub out from the Satori via the Radial Phazer and the Klark Pro Splitter DS 50 to the Adam Sub15 to feed both the left and right inputs. With the S-control software of the S3V’s i made a user preset using only a low-shelf of -12 db on 40Hz. On the Sub15 i did set the Sub Filter on 50Hz. Because the S3V’s already have a solid low end, the Sub15 only has to do its work between 20Hz and 50Hz in this case. With this setup i can switch off the Sub15 from the Satori monitor controller, but also do minimal adjustments with the Satori and the Radial Phazer. I also own a Antelope Galaxy 32 interface which supports 2.1 monitoring with extended control settings for the sub and the S3V’s, like EQ and delay etc. I did not yet tested this way of calibrating the monitors and the sub. Also i did not yet tested the Sub15 using the main outs to the Sub and connecting the S3V’s on the outputs of the Sub. Beside testing the Sub15 in a 2.1 and the Sub12 in a 2.1 and 2.2 setup, i also will test the Sub10 in a 2.1 and 2.2 setup with the S3V’s.

Limp Bizkit?

I´m selling my house and buying a pair of S5V`s, fuck the city im moving to the mountains wiht a pair of Adam´s XD. For real man.

My room is 5.5 meter long x 3.5 meter wide, but with acoustic treatment. At low volume levels and higher volume levels the S3V’s represent exactly the same trough the whole room.

If that's what you've got, GO FOR IT!

I use the iLouds for both composing and audio post for films and I think they're great! One issue is that they have a pretty steep roll-off below 50Hz (which makes sense given how tiny they are) so you're going to want to reference on headphones sometimes to check out the lowest frequencies of your projects. But other than that I've found them to be surprisingly accurate for the price.

Nope. Just the verticals. The H’s wouldn’t fit in my space.