Okay, time I weighed in... [Warning: it's quite late and I'm at the bleary-eyed-with-exhaustion stage so please don't hate me if this post is hopelessly ponderous and completely unintelligible! I'm also a BIG fan of ATC actives, so this post will most likely gush a smidgen - you have been warned...]
I have a pair of 20s, having traded in my Active 10s and sub (and then some...) for them nearly a year ago. Put simply, they're great. To my tastes, they're some of the very best speakers I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. There are one or two models I've heard that can do some aspect of the sound better than the 20s (e.g. the Leema Xens "disappear" better than just about any speaker I've ever heard, and I seem to remember the Neat Ultima standmounts sounding exceedingly sweet on the end of some mind-bogglingly expensive electronics at a hifi show once), and of course bigger speakers will punch harder and deeper in the bass arena, but short of the bigger ATC actives I don't believe any speaker I've heard does everything (or even more than just one or two things...) better than these puppies.
My biggest turn-on in hifi is realism. I love it when I can close my eyes and not have to try hard to pretend that the sound coming out of the pair of boxes in front of me is really Duke Ellington and his band, or the Wiener Philharminic, or The Zep. I really love it when the suspension of disbelief is effortless. As such, my favourite hifi tends to be the stuff that "messes" with the signal the least. I'm a fan of "hifi" in the old school sense - high fidelity to the recording. If it's not on the recording I don't want to hear it. (Hifi geeks like to fire up the old argument about how can the listener possibly know that their system is truly faithful to the recording, but in my experience, you can just hear it - it's blindingly obvious, a breath of fresh air. That was how I felt upon my first exposure to ATC actives, the 10s, about 3 years ago, after going through speaker after speaker, in every hifi shop in Edinburgh and Glasgow.)
ATC Actives just tell it like it is. They're designed as monitoring tools for the studio, but are also aimed at hifi users, following the somewhat controversial principle (with which I wholeheartedly agree) that a system that is accurate will be just as enjoyable, romantic, touching and beautiful as what you put into it. Some people (a lot of people) like their hifi to add a little something - spice things up, or whatever. ATCs don't do that. They have a balance that's about as neutral as anything and they don't smooth over any flaws in the upstream components or the recording.
They're big (for standmounts), chunky, and exceedingly heavy (says he of the 3rd floor flat...) They have one of the best 6" bass/mid drivers known to man, which is a 13kg (?) beast that can put out a lot of volume and take a lot of punishment without ever (IME) sounding distressed, or anything short of clean as a whistle. The tweeter is a fantastic number from SEAS (one thing that really puts the 20 several leagues above the 10 despite the family resemblance). The cabinet is very, very solid and heavy, and has very little influence on the sound. And this is of course topped off by a very serious, very high quality pair of largely Class A monobloc power amps that control the drivers perfectly and allow them to perform to the very limits of their capability.
The end result is very open, revealing, dynamic, fast, natural, clear, solid, 3-dimensional, and above all, realistic. The combination of meaty-ass bass driver, high class tweeter, inert cabinet, and active design, give the 20s a wonderful sense of ease and poise with all types of music, no matter how loud you like it. They never sound strained - if you have a particularly large room you might be able to push them to their limits but in my 13' x 18' room my ears give out long before the speakers do.
One brief word of warning: it took me an awful long time to find just the right positioning (including angle of tilt of the stands...) for them in my room - I'm not exaggerating when I say that a centimeter or two can mean the difference between "okay, but something's not right" frustration, and audio bliss. That said, my room is a bit of a nightmare acoustically and my recent experience with the 20s in a decent room (which I will get around to writing about eventually, honest Ditton!) seemed to indicate that the speakers are not necessarily the source of my positioning-related grief!
Anyway, I need to go to bed so I'll stop here (otherwise I could go on... and on and on and on...) Suffice it to say that in terms of the criteria you mentioned - dynamics, control of sound, and bass focus - I can't imagine you'll be anything short of delighted. They
do sound quite a bit different from Sonus Fabers, so it's possible you may not like them (speaker preference is about as personal and varied as anything). But TBH I'm willing to bet you'll fall in love with them, and never look back.
Do let us know what you think of them.
Dunc
