T5V or T7V? Which Adam Audio studio monitor should you get? Short comparison review

Today we compare two budget studio monitors from Adam Audio - smaller T5V and bigger T7V. Which one should you get? Is the bigger T7V worth the extra over T5V? Let's find out!

Build Quality

Obviously those two have identical build quality that is avarage for this class, with plastic fronts and "inexpensive" fit and finish. Both have rather flimsy contrls on the back (especially the notchless gain knob is a pain in the ass to level left and right channels) and both lack LED status light on the front panel. The most obvious difference between them is the physical size, but suprisingly I find them both to be rather cumbersome when placing on the desk. The reason for that is that T5V, all though shorter and narrower than T7V, has a cabinet that is significantly deeper, which makes it take up pretty much the same space on the desk as bigger T7V. They both have similar (quite annoying in use and audible over quiet music) levels of hiss emitted from the tweeters as well.

Sound Quality

SQ is where the differences become apparent and where T5V proves that there is no real point in going with bigger brother. Both T5V and T7V have a frequency response that is far from flat, which is not a good news for studio monitoring. First, the bass response is very similar in both, they both go down to similar depths, and the difference is that T7V has few decibels of volume more across the low bass. On the flip side in real life use smaller T5V feels tighter in low to mid bass and works better on desk. T5V has a small lift in low mids (around 250kHz) that results in more fleshed out male voices. Overall the midrange feels more open and present in T5V, while T7V seems vailed and slightly muddy in comparison. Both T5V and T7V have a dip in FR between 2kHz and 4kHz (4.5kHz in case of T7V) which results in precieved lack of presence in cymbals and electric guitars for example. Smaller T5V has also a lift in frequency response ranging from upper mids (ca 5.5kHz) to lower treble (13kHz), which makes it brighter and more analytical in overall presentation. Both T5V and T7V have nicely extended and airy treble, but smaller T5V creates more convincing soundstage with sharper images. T7V, due to bigger woofer and more power, has a grater headroom, but T5V is no sloutch and can play really loud as well.

Here is an in room frequency response graph taken at 1M using UMIK-1 microphone:

Here is a sound comparison video of T5V and T7V from my YouTube channel:

Conclusion

In the end, I find very little reson why one should choose bigger and more expensive T7V over smaller T5V, especially for home studio use. One area where T7V can be a better choice is if you want to use your monitors mostly for music listening in mid field. In this type of use T7V is more enjoyable monitor.