TransAudio Group, U.S. distributor professional recording equipment, has announced the new ATC SCS70 Pro, a compact, active subwoofer using ATC’s first in-house-designed-and-built low-frequency driver.
Designed by ATC founder/managing director Billy Woodman and the company’s team of engineers, the new 12-inch neodymium driver is designed to deliver detailed low-frequency information without the use of EQ or porting down to a stated 20 Hz.
The SCS70 Pro can be deployed as a single, in pairs, or larger multiples to suit a range of rooms and applications/formats, and they also can be daisy-chained for scalable performance and any number of them can be muted with a single footswitch. Flexible gain adjustment and multiple low-pass frequencies are designed to allow users to optimize the ATC SCS70 for the room and in relation to other monitors in a system.
The new LF driver is housed inside a sealed cabinet (i.e., an infinite baffle) that is deliberately heavy to minimize cabinet interaction. The driver uses a short coil inside a long magnetic gap, intended to produce high sound pressure levels with very low distortion.
A new Grounded Source MOSFET-based, class A-B convection-cooled amplifier is designed to work with the driver and accepts balanced input from either mono or stereo sources. Buffered and unfiltered balanced throughputs provide connection to additional SCS70 subwoofers and/or full-range monitors. It measures 18 x 22 x 20 inches and weighs in at 97 pounds.
“Billy and his team have meticulously engineered this sub from the ground up, including a brand-new driver with a neodymium motor and matched amplifier to give the active ATC SCS70 the same kind of brutal honesty in the sub frequencies that ATC is so famous for in the midrange,” says Brad Lunde, founder and president of TransAudio Group. “Engineers are dealing with greater and greater demand from artists for more sub output and they need accuracy down low. Subwoofers can be a source of distortion, making the mixing or mastering process a guessing game.
“Now an ATC system, complete with the one or two SCS70 subs, can deliver full bandwidth audio for any genre, enabling superior translation on any system it gets played on, from ear buds to home hi-fi to clubs and everything in-between. Other subwoofers rely on EQ and poorly implemented ports, transmission lines or passive radiators to boost low end and make their subs sound impressive. These ideas are audibly appealing, but they give audio professionals a cloudy impression of what’s going on down there. Just as engineers have come to trust ATC’s full-range monitors for translation, the new ATC SCS70 will do the same in the sub frequencies.”
Additional features include 21 dB of gain control, four low-pass frequencies, and a polarity reversal that, together with 180-degrees of continuously variable phase, allow 360-degrees of continuous phase shift. The four low-pass frequencies are set at 50, 65, 80, and 320 Hz (off) and delivered via a fourth-order Linkwitz Riley filter. The 320 Hz (off) setting allows users to implement their own external processing.
Fault monitoring protects the SCS70 in the event of extreme temperature or amplifier DC offset, and a proprietary+ Active FET Momentary Gain Reduction protection limiter prevents amp overload. Users can toggle an entire system SCS70 Pros on or off via a daisy-chained single latching footswitch (without affecting the thru jacks to the full-range monitors). Two LEDs on the front panel indicate power on, limiting, and mute/unmute. Maximum sound pressure is stated as 110 dB continuous, 116 dB peak, and total output power is 300 watts into 8 Ohms. Amplifier total harmonic distortion plus noise is less than 0.003 percent.
U.S. pricing: $5,490 (list), $4,990 (MAP), and introductory pricing of $4,490 is being offered through August 18, 2022.
