HOW many of us know the respective ages of those we consider “hi-fi heroes”, the brave souls who chanced their arm at a career in manufacturing hi-fi components? Mr De Paravicini? Mr D’Agostino? Messrs Conrad and Johnson?
You may be surprised to learn that the founder of UK’s Loudspeaker Technology Ltd is now 70 years old. If the company name does not ring a bell, the name its products are marketed under, Acoustic Transducer Company or ATC Loudspeaker Technology, certainly would. As would the name of its founder and managing director, Billy Woodman.
ATC is celebrating Woodman’s becoming a septuagenarian with a Signature version of a landmark ATC design. Based on the highly original and acclaimed SCM10 mini-monitor from 1990, the Signature Edition SCM10SE is an immaculate reworking of the breakthrough model.
Presented in a lustrous ATC blue piano finish, the SCM10SE is enhanced with an anodised silver aluminium tweeter wave guide, complementary silver mid/bass driver surround and a fine grain blue leather baffle, hand-finished by Eissmann, a leading supplier of pristine interior trims for many of the world’s most desirable car brands including Aston Martin, Bugatti, Lamborghini and McLaren.
Matching the flawless precision of its finish, the SCM10SE’s proprietary drivers and crossovers are wholly conceived and hand-built at ATC’s UK development and production facility at Stroud, Gloucestershire.
The original SCM10’s soft dome tweeter has been replaced with a recently developed SH25-76S ‘S-Spec’ 25mm dual-suspension design, and its ground-breaking SB45-125SC 125mm mid/bass unit with a latest version, complete with integral soft dome.
The system’s crossover is re-designed for the new drive units and uses ATC’s hand-wound air-cored inductors and high performance polypropylene capacitors throughout.
Appropriately, the SCM10SE is limited to a production run of just 70 pairs, each supplied with an exclusive owner’s guide relating the story of Woodman’s career from his formative engineering in Australia to the seminal, ethos-building work at Goodmans in the UK and culminating in the founding and flourishing of his company as a world-renowned exponent of high performance audio reproduction systems for the studio, cinema, club and home.
The SCM10SE, priced at £3,491 a pair, is available in April.
