To better understanding the failure of adhesive joints tensile tests were carried out on miniature test specimens from Norway spruce in the synchrotron. Urea-formaldehyde resin was used as adhesive. e. For comparison purposes, tensile tests were carried out on solid wood and on bonded miniature tensile shear samples with acoustic emission. The acoustic emission signals of all the experiments occurred with classified pattern recognition. This resulted in two classes of signals for each two frequency peaks. One class consisted of the low-frequency and the other of the higher-frequency peak of higher intensity, but this was essentially independent from the structure (solid wood or plywood) and size scale of the test specimens. The influence of the adhesive layers was determined on wood test specimens on laboratory scale and on miniature test specimens with an adhesive layer and selected fiber orientations. This gave evidence that the sound emission signals from the failure of the adhesive layer presumably of the class with low frequency signals peak in the range of services can be assigned.