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As on my previous JLA floorstanders, the rear switch to modify the response between 1500Hz and 30kHz in three 1.5dB steps from "soft" to "medium" to "bright" was in effect quite subtle but noticeable and a comfortable and flexible option. Again as with the JLA before, my preference ended up being the bypass or central position despite not having a perfect room.

The Atohm monitors delivered a much larger soundstage than their very compact size would have let on. It is thus truly possible to use the GT1 in a listening room up to 50 square meters without benefiting from any relevant room gain. The cherry on the cake resides in the ability to recreate the sound of many floorstanders at realistic scale without impacting accuracy. In the same way I was recently amazed by the open sound provided by the small B&W PM-1. The sensation of opulence was quite comparable between these two excellent compact monitors.

In comparison to my Triangle Duettos, the first obvious difference after size was weight. The Atohm GT1 turned out to be a very friendly creature that will do well in a limited space where its small size maintains sufficient separation to get a soundstage of acceptable width. Widely placed in an elongated rather than equilateral triangle they develop an impressively broad soundstage and at the same time avoid the characteristic bloat of bass-reflex loading.

My quest for best in-room position was a rather easy task. This speaker does not seem to interact very much with the side walls. It maintains good focus with a precise soundstage albeit not one as deep as the more expensive Triangles will throw. Those Duettos also tend to deliver more air and detail. Their bandwidth seems more extended in the low end despite Triangle’s specifications to the contrary. They tend to sound a bit brighter than the Atohms but both speakers are very strong on coherence and musicality. They are two designs—three if I consider the B&W—which I could easily live with. The GT1 sound is truly prodigious for a speaker with such a small footprint. It produces no particular waffling on bass notes and no apparent pseudo harmonics of cabinet talk. Here timbres are very decent and clear. Naturally this isn’t the most transparent speaker extant but if you attempted to identify true rivals on size and price, I’d expect you’d meet some very real difficulties. I would highlight the consistency of this Atohm model which represents an interesting compromise between dynamic involvement and listening comfort, between punchy élan and laid-back personality.


Again, for its size the Atohm GT 1 had a very decently developed bass register. Even so the addition of the Rafale V38s subwoofer allowed it to obviously flourish. That hadn’t proven the case with my Triangles whose exceptional down-low fortitude doesn’t call for particular support (unless one perhaps invoked a true ultra-performance subwoofer). Except for a few organ recordings, the added value of a sub with the Magellans had always seemed spurious and the notion of spending more than the sticker for the monitors to simply cover more ground between 20 and 40Hz less than a bargain.

That said I’ll admit that the added V38s released more bass dynamics even with the Duettos. Ultimately here I’d probably want two V38s in ‘closed’ mode to really make sense and obtain performance that then would probably exceed some quite expensive floorstanders at far lower cost. I did briefly have opportunity to experiment with two V38s units into their direct inputs preceded by the advanced bass management of the Trinnov ST2 HiFi. Those results were stunning. Led by such filtering brain power I can only imagine what one could achieve long-term with two V38s. With the Atohms’ lighter innate bass balance the advantage of one Atohm sub in a 2.1 stereo setup over the low-level RCA inputs was far more obvious. After several trials I left the subwoofer position in closed mode with a 24dB/octave filter, the low-pass at nearly 60Hz, phase at 0° and the level at less than half the full range. The V38s operated very quietly and I never detected any pumping or chuffing port noise even at realistic levels. The subwoofer did need to be accurately placed and should not directly sit on the floor. Spikes or small feet are mandatory for hifi purposes. It's a pity Atohm does not include them.