I have made a point of visiting rooms at Shows featuring speakers from the Adam, the German manufacturer successfully extending their expertise with professional monitor loudspeakers into the world of consumer audio. In the room at Axpona, strategically treated with RealTraps, Adam were showing off their Tensor Beta towers ($31,000/pair) with Accuphase amplification and CD player via Transparent cable. The speaker's two Hexacone woofers are mounted on the front and back of the lower enclosure and driven by an internal amplifier. The midrange and treble enclosure is decoupled from the woofer cabinet with three sand-filled leather bags and both double-walled enclosures have the space between the walls filled with sand.

The glory of this speaker is the upper-midrange and HF units, which are an evolutionary development of the Heil Air-Motion Transformer, which squeezes the air between its pleats. Adam's chief designer Klaus Henze worked with Dr. Oskar Heil in the early 1980s. Listening to Nils Lofgren's "Keith Don't Go" on this system, I was struck by how real the high frequencies sounded, with a silky smooth quality that did not result from the treble being rolled-off. We are planning an Adam review from Kalman Rubinson.