Audiophilepure

On the downside, at first, the bass drivers seemed a touch stiff and limited when playing bass-rich tracks like “Your Momma Don’t Dance” on Kenny Loggins’s Outside: From the Redwoods album. Also, the tweeter seemed a bit rolled-off at the top. These apparent weaknesses become more apparent when compared to my reference $16,000 Usher ML-802 loudspeakers. A foot taller, almost twice as heavy (at 128 pounds to the ATC’s 68.31 lbs.), and sporting two eight-inch bass drivers to the ATC’s single, 6 1/2″ woofer, the Ushers dug deeper in the lower frequencies, and using its magnesium alloy tweeter, it had more extended highs than the ATCs, with their handmade tweeters. 

Within a week, the SCM40’s tweeters began opening up, and the low-frequency drivers began loosening up as well. They still couldn’t compete with the Ushers (that are rated to go down to 26Hz, versus the conservatively rated 48Hz for the ATCs) in the lower octaves. But, in all fairness, I knew that going in and had planned on auditioning the ATCs SCM40s with a pair of subwoofers to better pressurize the roughly 960 square feet area like the Ushers had been doing all along (I originally chose the Usher ML-802s, with their pair of eight-inch bass drivers, over their single bass driver Usher ML-801 that I had previously reviewed because of this large space).  

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