Adam A7 mods

[leigh]

hey hey,

Has anyone opened up their Adam A7 monitors? I'm thinking about bypassing the EQ controls on the back and the Input Gain controls on the front. I'm curious if they provided easy jumpers to do this with, or if I'm on my own... 'course, I could contact the Adam company to ask for a schematic, which might provide a clue.

cheers,
Leigh

[lotusstudio]

Check THIS! On the back of the A7 there are 3 rubber plugs hiding small adjustment screws that really change the sound. They seem to have been factory set and there's no explanation in the manual of specifically what they do. It seems they would want to user to know. (These are in addition to the 3 labeled adjustment screws.)

Anyone work for Adam who can comment on this?

[The Scum]

I don't work for ADAM, and don't know much about the monitors in question.

I'd advise you to be very careful with those unlabeled trimpots. They might be interesting sonically...or they might be true factory adjustments that you have no interest in, and changing could be potentially disastrous, like DC offset nulling, or adjusting the master PWM carrier frequency of the class D amp.

[lotusstudio]

WHU?!

[Vogon]

"Ouchie"...

[suppositron]

I have not opened mine and have no intentions of messing with anything inside nor those adjustment screws. You could really screw things up using those. Are those eq's passive or active? If set to zero is anyone hearing a difference to where they think they should be bypassed?

[leigh]

I have not opened mine and have no intentions of messing with anything inside nor those adjustment screws. You could really screw things up using those. Are those eq's passive or active? If set to zero is anyone hearing a difference to where they think they should be bypassed?

I concur that turning unlabeled trimpots is a bad idea.

As for the EQ, not sure where you draw the line between "passive" and "active" for eq's, but they are most definitely "active". That is, they definitely have amplifier stages between them, otherwise you'd have interaction between the freq bands (like on a Pultec).

The only way to tell if the EQ is making a difference when zeroed would be to add a bypass switch to the EQ circuit, and make A/B comparisons that way. I would expect the differences to be quite subtle.

I just changed my monitor controller to a completely passive system, and so I've gotten a bit obsessed about removing all other unnecessary active stages between the DAC and the monitors' power amps. I don't use the EQs on the Adam A7s, and I'd prefer to just jumper the Input Gain at a fixed setting, so I figure there's a handful of opamps and pots I can remove from the signal chain.

Actually, once those were out of the circuit, there would be no pots left at all in my monitoring chain... whee...

cheers,
Leigh

[suppositron]

I suppose that was a dumb question. If there is gain on the eq then it is active circuitry. Let me know if you try it and hear a difference. I left mine set to zero for now and am thinking about moving them to a different spot in my room and building stands for them. I probably wouldn't hear a big difference bypassing the eq.

[Felixmarceau]

The hidden pots are under the plugs are for

Internal high gain
Internal low gain
Internal Bass Boost

[Nick Sevilla]

The hidden pots are under the plugs are for

Internal high gain
Internal low gain
Internal Bass Boost

And you know this how?

[Felixmarceau]

I have the schematic.