Audiophilepure

They look virtually indistinguishable from my SCM40 passives, except that they have black, finned amp packs at their rear bottom half, a power cord, and a single balanced cable instead of a pair of speaker cables plugged into them. Like my passives, they are gracefully understated, a minimalist marvel that my wife, Belle, loves. The prefix initials, SCM, stand for Studio Control Monitor, and the ’40’ stands for the volume in liters inside the speaker. Standing 38.58″ tall with a 9 1/4″ wide front baffle, it boasts a 6 1/2″ bass driver, a three-inch ATC Soft Dome midrange driver, and a one-inch Neodymium tweeter on the top half, with its “ATC Acoustic Engineering” badge just below. Its curved sides narrow down to 7″ at its rear. Upfront at its base, a 14.56″ wide wooden plinth is supported by removable spikes, while two additional spikes are located toward the cabinet’s rear (aftermarket feet, like the IsoAcoustic Gaia III that I use, can be substituted for the spikes).

A sealed box design, they’re quite accommodating to room size and placement, as Jerry Willsie, veteran Director of Sales at Straight Wire, Inc. (whose Crescendo 3 speaker cables are used with my SCM40 passives, while their Crescendo 3 balanced cables connect to the active version), informed me prior to my review of the passive ATC SCM40s. 

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