Proac 1sc


Small stand mount speakers from British speaker manufacturer Proac. These are luxury monitors and have two drive units a tweeter and a mid bass unit. They are very small but surprisingly heavy. I say surprisingly but when you look at the build quality you will realise very quickly why they weigh so much. They really are built to last and are covered in the best quality veneer you will find on any speaker. Proac have a superb reputation for the quality of their speaker finishes and I can see why.

Sounds?

You will either love them or hate them. There will be no middle ground. You may well respect them for what they do but if their not your cup of tea you won't listen to them for long! What they do well they do amazingly well. Imaging is just unbelievable! Put on some solo female voice and the artist is standing in front of you singing just for you!

If you heard them in the next room you would swear that it is real life and not hifi, such is the way this speaker handle images. The next huge strength is the mid range. It is perfect in every way. Sweet and so emotive. If you like simple jazz or folk or female voice, you could possibly never want for anything else.

They also sound superb with valve equipment. They are rated at 8 ohms so make an easy load for low powered quality equipment and these little beauties really do need quality. Pair them with something a little rough around the edges and they will scream at you!

For some reason there are a lot of Naim users who use these speakers and other than the fact that these are the most live sounding speakers on planet earth, this has to be an awful combination! They, in my opinion sound great with valves or something like Sugden or quad. They like smoothness because, and this is a fault of these speakers, they can sound incredibly thin and rough.

I have tried them with Naim equipment and it sounded like something had broken! The music was a jumbled mess, with no body and colour. Just horrible! One of their other faults is that they do not like badly recorded music, crap in and absolute crap out! You find that you quickly have to dismiss half of your music collection when listening to these speakers, not good.

Other things to mention are they have no real bass, sound like small speakers and do not time very well, and it is the timing issue that I feel is their worst asset.

In terms of the timing they do not do a very good job at all. I can forgive them for sounding small as they are very small (what do you expect!) and because of this they are never going to have much bass but I do like my equipment to be time coherent and they just aren't.

Unfortunately the bass plods away somewhere behind all of the other instruments. Bass drums are not in time with bass lines and the treble in general happens way before the bass does. If you don't listen to pop or rock you may never even notice this flaw but I do and it does ruin my enjoyment somewhat.

In conclusion these are very well built luxury monitors that have some truly amazing qualities and equally bad flaws. If you like them you will buy them! Nothing else images like them or has such wonderful mid range. They are as good as you can get in those areas. Unfortunately they do not handle timing as well and I feel they should really only be used with very, very expensive equipment as they positively thrive on refinement.

So if you do have a serious hi end set up, preferably using valves and only have a small room then I am sure you should try these out, if not then you probably already own these speakers!

Ebay Alert!

Proac speakers have the highest 2nd hand value of any speaker and these little speakers are among the most expensive of the range. This is good news if you buy them new but you will rarely get much change out of £700. I bought some for £450 once in mint condition. Lucky eh!