Adam Inherits the Heil AMT Mantle

Adam Professional Audio is a German company that makes loudspeakers aimed at, as the name suggests, the professional market; their list of users include Abbey Road Studios and Lincoln Center. They're now poised to enter home audio. They had several of their speakers on display, but the only ones actually playing were in a large home theater demo room. The demonstration piece was the "chase" scene from the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale, and all I can say about the sound was that it was loud. (Putting on my ultimateavmag.com hat, I can also say that the projector's color saturation was set too high.) However, reading the product literature, it's clear that the speakers represent a formidable amount of technology. The tweeter and midrange driver are based on the Air Motion Transformer principle developed by the late Oskar Heil, called Accelerated Ribbon Technology (A.R.T.) in Adam's implementation. (Klaus Heinz, Adam's chief engineer, worked with Heil.) The woofers have a honeycomb-structure diaphragm. The Adam Tensor Betas that served as the front L and R speakers use two 11" woofers and a 7" one, plus two midrange units and a tweeter. Powered with B&O ICE module. class-D amplifiers, a pair of Beta Tensors cost $60,000. There are two other speakers in the Tensor series, all semi- or fully active, the prices varying from $30k to $80k.

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