I understand everyone here loves their speakers and I'm not saying they're bad, but I had a very different opinion after testing them and A/Bing them. I picked the BM15as and not just because they're 1/2 the price.
What I heard from all the ADAMs including the S-3A was a general failure to marry the best tweeter in the world with any woofer of any size. The dispersion of the ADAM tweeter, while wider than other ribbons I've heard (recently the SLS model), is still limited. If you're in the sweetspot the imaging is phenomenal and you do hear phase with incredible detail, but only in the range the tweeter covers. I found low end phase and detail much less clear. Also, aside from my opinion that the low end on the S-3A is weirdly center-focused giving it a thuddy and opaque sound, the real problem is how it interacts with the tweeter. The crossover point exhibits the same characteristics of so many speakers of being both cloudy and piercing at the same time. Essentially it obscures detail in that range which is an extremely crucial range. It's your lead vox, snare, guitars, attack of the kick, bass, floor tom, wash of the cymbals...etc. Granted that murkey and assalting quality is nowhere near as bad as in say the Mackies that have become so popular, but it's still there. At least when compared to the Dynaudios. It wasn't something I picked up on when I was only listening to the ADAMs (which was how I began my test since I went in thinking I wanted them).
I did my listening test at Dale Audio in NYC. The ADAMs rep had place the S-3As himself so, this should not have been an issue of the listening environment. I think it's interesting that almost everyone here transfered from Genelecs. The 1031s have a similar issue although it's manifested in a different way. 1031s aren't piercing or cloudy, but the woofers are hyped in a really bad way to make them phase-accurate with the tweeters. There's a real imposed tightness on the low end that sounds great but doesn't translate and again, the worst band in terms of translation was the cross-over frequencies. While my experience with the ADAMs was limited to the one test at Dale, I've done many mixes and tracking sessions on 1031s and those issues are well established.
In the process of doing my listening test I developed a philosophy of speaker reproduction. Speakers are a gestalt phenomena. We're listening to one sound being generated by discrete components. The greater the difference between these components, the more the gestalt phenomena breaks down. The more aware you are of the individual components, the worse the translation will be. Both Genelec and ADAMs innovated tweeters but not woofers. In the case of Dynaudio, they specifically innovated a component that was common to both drivers by introducing the aluminum wire-wrapped voice coil. While the tweeter in the BM15s isn't as brilliant as the ADAMs I believe the transparency of the crossover is much better and so is the translation. I should mention that I had never considered the Dynaudios before the listening test and I researched the components after hearing how coherent the crossover was. It also bears mentioning that the active BM15a has a different crossover than the passive model and a new tweeter.
But hey.....this is just my opinion and ultimately you can learn to mix on anything so...knock yourself out. I just came to a different conclusion after some careful consideration so I thought I'd share.
