PHILOSOPHY & VISION

The Digital Era Nowadays, most of the audio industries work on digital media. From recording to playback, the complete chain relies on digital coding and storage. Therefore, it seems obvious to stay in the digital domain as long as possible so as to avoid the inherent losses of the analogue processing. The semiconductor industry has now acquired the expected maturity regarding the DAC and ADC solutions. DSPs are becoming more and more powerful, making very clean audio processing possible. The time when digital audio was inferior to pure analogue restitution is over. Because of these reasons, ATD2 primarily decided to focus on digital active monitors. We have paid a lot of attention to the analogue audio circuitry and have first designed state of the art DACs and ADCs. Once only we got the perfect results (both performances and listening tests), we then inserted a DSP in the system. Our designs cannot in any way be compared to those various DSP boards in which a powerful DSP is hooked to a poor audio codec. Perfect time alignment of the drivers is for sure the most powerful feature of the digital processing. All of our speakers have an optimal impulse response. An other additional advantage is the easy set-up of a multi-channel system: even when the ideal speaker positions cannot be achieved, the time delays can be precisely tuned in order to get a perfect time alignment of all the speakers in the surround system. The speaker itself makes room equalization now possible. The embedded DSP can compensate for variations in the room frequency response, making it as flat as possible. This allows the sound engineer to keep its sound reference whatever room he is working in. Our digital technology allows any user to create a powerful network that can control the entire settings available on the monitors. Moreover a smart software design of the remote and the computer controls improves tremndously the system ergonomics.