Now that’s what I call low distortion! More than 60dB in many parts of the 86dB sweep and still 50dB down in the 96dB sweep! That’s lower distortion than a lot of amplifiers!
These would make nice desktop monitors.
i have fairly similar monitors from JBL and they work well in a small room paired to a subwoofer.
96 db is a good figure as concerts are now capped to 100db max …
on other hand 1 meter really means you’re sitting in front of your computer editing tracks - that isn’t how you’re supposed to enjoy music
in a larger room from about 2 - 3 meters away you will be pushing these even with a subwoofer. and the super flat response to 20 khz won’t matter as the room will dominate response anyway plus there is barely anything above 10 khz in music.
better off IMO getting a prosound speaker that won’t be as flat but will rock harder.
of course it depends on your room, your usage …
if you’re in a San Francisco or NYC apartment you can’t really use anything bigger than these Neumanns.
if you have large suburban house IMO it would be stupid to go this small …
but regardless you should try it both ways and see what you prefer. any assumptions either you or me make will be wrong.
it’s not just size either. my Mackie monitors with 8" woofers sounded more strained than my JBLs with 5" woofers … then again the JBLs sounded thinner.
anyway i wouldn’t be interested in these Neumanns except for a small NYC / SF apartment and / or for mastering tracks.
for all-round use i would still want Prosound 3-way + subwoofer. i don’t care if it measures worse.
at the end of the day music is designed to be played on prosound speakers. that’s just fact.
monitors are tools to create music not enjoy it.
a good modern prosound speaker can go flat to 10 khz and that’s all you need. you don’t need flat to 20 khz. there is virtually nothing of value above 10 khz.
on other hand a prosound 3-way will be able to hit as hard as you like without any midrange distortion, which is what you want for ultimate enjoyment.
also to really enjoy music you will want to boost the bass ( House Curve / Harman Curve, etc ) which will put further strain on a small woofer doing double duty for both bass and vocals.
a 3-way separates bass instruments from the vocals allowing the woofer to do heavy lifting while vocals stay clean.
same benefit with dedicated subs - frees he woofer from having to shake the room.
if all you needed were tiny 2-way monitors why would studios have giant main monitors in addition to these tiny nearfields ? get it ?
you can’t spend your whole work day BLASTING music - your ears will fatigue. you need to do most of the work at moderate levels, using these tiny nearfields. but then at some point maybe you want to demonstrate the results and that’s what the 15" 3-way main monitors are for.
Dr. Dre would actually take the finished recording to his car and blast it there as a final check. He didn’t try to master the records in the car though.
an athlete plays on a football field with a ball but has his shoulder / knee surgery in an operating room with a scalpel. what you want to do is make him play with a scalpel. it makes no sense.
LOL
but i don’t want you to take my word for it. you have to try these things for yourself.
try both small monitors and big prosound speakers in your own room. rent them, borrow from a friend i dunno - it doesn’t have to be the exact model. just try both speaker types in your own room for your own type of listening that you do ( or watching movies ) and don’t try to be critical / analytical - just note which one you PREFER.
i can’t predict the outcome of this experiment at all. i just know what i prefer personaly. you have to find out for yourself.
to confuse you even further i will give you yet another analogy.
the holy grail of microphones is 1" capsule. i have an AKG microphone that is hand made in Vienna using a gold diaphragm 1" capsule that i used for my YouTube videos. these types of microphones are NOT accurate, but prized for their overall sound, especially for vocals. they are only flat to about 4 khz or so.
then there are instrument microphones that are at the same time cheaper and more accurate but use a smaller 3/4" capsule that has less “depth” to the sound … these are typically flat to about 10 khz …
and then finally there are measurement microphones using very small 1/4" capsules that are RULER FLAT beyond 20 khz … yet nobody actually uses them to record music.
meditate on that …
DYNAMIC RANGE …
with my 1" AKG mic i could record the sound of cars passing miles away even with windows closed - my YouTube viewers told me to stop fucking around with EQ and compressor because they could hear every drop of saliva as i was speaking. i was boosting it up something like 30 decibels LOL.
the moral of the story is sometimes bigger is better even if it means less accurate, because you can EQ the response but you can’t EQ dynamic range …
get it ? 
You don’t need one or the other. These are for mixing music and critical listening. They are also all you need if you are sitting at a desktop listening to music. You can’t use large speakers for nearfield because the drivers don’t sum properly at that distance. You need something small.
In a professional mastering and mixing setup you will have nearfield, midfield, and far field monitors. These fit the bill very nicely for nearfield.
but why do YOU need near-field ?
i can’t listen to music sitting in a chair.
i have to jump around the room
i want to have a large dynamic envelope and then i can tinker with EQ to make it sound how i want it to sound …
i don’t want a tiny speaker that sounds pretty good but the moment you try to turn it up or EQ it you run out of steam …
remember that if there is any room correction you want to do you may need to have extra dynamic range for that …
for example if your room sucks out 100 hz for whatever reason and your speakers are already at the limit at 100 hz …
reflection from rear wall behind speakers is almost guaranteed to produce a suckout at some frequency where the reflected wave is out of phase … with a big speaker you can easily EQ that … as well as boost the bass for richer sound …
of course in a true nearfield situation you don’t have a rear wall to worry about … you have a console in the middle of a large room and any reflected waves are well attenuated …
but if you’re in a NYC apartment you are shoving speakers next to a wall of some sort, plus have standing waves to worry about that can create nulls …
the point being extra dynamic capability never hurt anybody !
in evolutionary biology there is a concept of over-specialization or over-adaptation
it is when a species is so perfectly adapted to environment that when environment changes it goes extinct
that’s what you have with these Neumanns - they are over-adapted to the nearfield studio monitor environment
it has also been said that man isn’t the fastest, strongest or even the most intelligent of species - but the most adaptable
that’s what i want in speakers - i want a speaker that can do anything - that can work indoors or outdoors on the ground or suspended in the air, a speaker that can be used for critical listening but also for jamming, music and movies and so on …
prosound speakers pretty much do that …
this Neumann doesn’t …
but yes the measurements are incredible you should try it for yourself maybe for you it’s just what you need …
the problem is placebo effect …
if you start out with the belief that these superior measurements necessarily translate to superior listening experience you will end up convincing yourself that you are in fact having a superior experience …
instead i challenge you to approach it with an open mind.
don’t make up your mind as to which speaker is “best” before listening to them.
only use measurements to determine which speakers are worth trying out for yourself but once you’re listening to them don’t tell yourself that the speaker with better measurements must be the one that sounds better …
measurements are better than hearsay
for example everybody raves about Danley but they measure like ass
since i can’t try them myself i’m going to go with measurements and conclude they are ass
but once you have speakers in your possession it shouldn’t matter at that point what the measurements look like
your own experience must take precedence at least when it comes to choosing speakers for yourself
it may not be of much value when recommending speakers to others as we don’t all look for the same thing …
for example some guys like girls with big tits while others like Joe Biden like little 9 year old girls …
yes all else being equal flatter response is better but all else is never equal …
Well if you’re sitting at a desk working on a computer and can’t get up then you will want some near field monitors. What are you going to do, put your desk in the middle of a room with big DJ speakers 20 feet away? Near field monitors are a very practical way to listen to music for a lot of situations. I’m not saying you should use them for home listening in general, but I am saying that you shouldn’t use big speakers for near field either. You simply don’t need big speakers for a lot of uses, so it’s nice to have something like this.
I have heard that Danley’s sound quite good. They measure like crap in terms of frequency response and have a bunch of resonances and points of compression and decompression. The directivity is very nice though. Because they are perfect point sources they give you great imaging and that holographic effect you get from coaxial speakers.
And yes these things are real.
Imaging and soundstage are so real in fact that you can take advantage of them when playing video games to pinpoint the source of enemies without even looking for them. It’s pretty cool.
if you’re working while listening to music the number one thing in the way of you being able to enjoy music is going to be the work you’re doing and not anything related to the speakers.
you could take speakers from the junk yard, drink some beer, smoke some pot, crank them up and enjoy the music 10 times more with those free speakers than you would with a $3,500 pair of Neumann Nearfield Monitors while working.
personally i just use headphones now ( Bose NC700 ). i can listen in front of computer, then go to the bathroom or kitchen or do some dancing and the music is not interrupted.
one downside with headphones like this is they are uncomfortable to wear over reading glasses. if you use glasses while on the computer you would need to test that specific scenario.
what i do is i use a big screen TV as my display and when i’m watching news etc i just use the integrated speakers in the TV … when i want to listen to music i put on the headphones. i have a whole bunch of speakers and subs but none of them are hooked up - they’re all in the basement. only speakers currently hooked up are the PA speakers in the living room for watching movies.
i mean you have to ask yourself - WHEN do you ENJOY music the most ? for me it may be while working out, driving, dancing or under influence of drugs. certainly not while working. but that’s me - you need to figure this out for yourself.
then you have to make sure your best speakers are targeting THOSE applications.
otherwise you will end up like me where you have super accurate studio monitors … boxed up in the basement.
the irony is that Danleys are prosound speakers but imaging is not a thing in prosound. it’s literally not a thing. imaging is a thing for cinema, headphones, home audio and to some extent car audio. but it’s not a thing for pro audio.
as best i can tell the only people who use Danley are the ones on the same internet forums where Danley is present.
you go to a random music festival or club and you will see the usual suspects like JBL, EAW, RCF maybe L-Acoustics etc. i have never seen Danley in the wild. But it’s all over the forums.
imaging can be cool when you’re stoned or tripping on acid or something like that - but otherwise it has no real relationship to music enjoyment. it’s one of those things people analyze because it is something that can be analyzed and discussed - but the real question is - can it be enjoyed ?
the things that are ENJOYED in music are:
1 - vocals
2 - bass
3 - loudness
the smartest guy on DIY Audio who builds 5-way Synergy Horns using Q-Sys DSP has confirmed that this analysis of mine is accurate, right before i was banned.
he didn’t even bring imaging up at all, though i do not dispute that a coaxial will probably image better, but then again a 128 channel dolby atmos system will probably image better still … and yet all efforts to record music in surround sound over half a century of such experiments have FAILED because people simply DO NOT CARE. music is simply not about imaging. a female voice isn’t made sexier by imaging. a kick drum isn’t made more powerful. it simply doesn’t matter.
now if you were a competitive first person shooter gamer you would probably want to have a setup with the best imaging possible. in that case imaging would trump everything else.
for home theater imaging would probably be fairly important.
for music ?
not really.
nobody disputes that our ear-brain mechanism can process spatial cues from 2 ears. in fact it is better at this than previously believed and we can tell for example if sound comes from above or below even though both our ears are in the horizontal plane. clearly the brain applies pretty fancy processing to extract position / location data from the ears because our very survival would have depended on this during the entirety of our evolution.
but is any of this relevant to music enjoyment ?
i am once again forced to repeat the words of Romy the Cat: NO OSCILLOSCOPE LIKE LISTENING !
yes we must analyze physics etc. when designing speakers or shopping for them …
but we must also remember what the ultimate goal is - it is not accuracy and it is not imaging - it is enjoyment
what causes music enjoyment ? this is the first and last question we should ask yet no audiophile asks it. because half of them are frauds ( who only pretend to hear or care ) and the other are autists ( who get carried away with the science and lose the forest for the trees ).
i am an autist too, but i aspire to rise above my autism and encourage you to do the same
just because something is real doesn’t mean it’s important. just because something is audible doesn’t mean we should optimize for it.
listen to Elon Musk - he said you must identify the parts of the tree - what are the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves - and work from the foundation up …
99% of people just focus on decorating the Christmas tree, they don’t even see the tree itself …
what is it that causes pleasure when listening to music ? believe it or not some of the smartest people have written on the subject in AES papers, discussing factors such as influence of alcohol for example …
meanwhile “audiophiles” who don’t have 1% of the knowledge focus on things like imaging, because they just want to signal that they are experts - but these things don’t actually matter
you know it’s really like a circle with a fine split in it - or like that bell curve meme
the stupidest and the smartest people in audio approach speakers the same exact way - they go for big loud boxes that slam
while the people in the middle debate esoteric subjects like cryogenic treatments of silver cables
there is nothing wrong with understanding things like imaging, directivity and all that other stuff we were talking about - but you have to maintain a sense of perspective - all of this stuff is secondary to just having a big loud box that slams
out of all my speakers the ones that aren’t in the basement are the loudest ones, not the most accurate ones …
and yes i can hear the difference like night and day even between two monitors both claiming to be perfectly accurate - but i don’t care
i don’t care which one is more accurate
i care which one is louder and slams harder
well, and which one makes female vocals sexier
in one of my favorite movies ( Midsommar 2019 ):
they were using inbreeding to create retards that were “unclouded by cognition”
these retards would doodle stuff and the smartest people would analyze and interpret the meaning of the doodles and write books about it
well that’s pretty much the situation with Audio. the smartest people are analyzing retarded drunks in clubs to understand the true meaning of music …
i’m encouraging you to level up to true elite level thinking, which is where we recognize that retards had it right all along …
and everybody else is just playing themselves …
Midsommar is Jewish garbage
it’s a remake of an older movie, which i also reviewed:
I don’t understand why you are hating on these so much. They are great speakers with perfect measurements and would work extremely well for a certain application. It seems like you’re saying that music should only be enjoyed a certain way and that when you’re at home you have to crank it up and get up an dance to the music. That’s fun and all, but people don’t always listen to music like that and not all music should even be listened like that. Certain genres maybe.
When it comes to enjoying classical music, for example, the best way to do that is by sitting down and listening to the music. It is an even more enjoyable experience when you have great speakers that give you a holographic soundstage and make you believe that you are there in the concert hall. Jazz as well. I want to feel like I am at a good jazz club or coffee shop while I write or do work on the computer.
It’s also not true that a speaker does one or the other. I want to spend my money on something that does everything well. I want it to get louder than I could possibly want without straining and I want it to have perfect measurements and sound great in my room and give me goosebumps and perfect imaging and a deep soundstage and all of that. There are speakers like that, and those are the speakers that I want. Give me JBL M2’s or something from Revel or Genelec that can get loud and I am a happy man.
These speakers fit the bill for nearfield listening and I would consider them for that use. And that is a legitimate way to listen to music.
The director’s other movie Heriditary is better. At least the first half is really scary and well written. The second half is silly and the movie turns into Jewish garbage at the end like Midsommar.
It’s hilarious how poorly these Jews understand anything metaphysical or spiritual like ghosts or the afterlife. When a Jewish atheist makes a movie about these things it’s bound to be retarded. I guess that’s what happens when you reject the most important religious leader in history and turn your religion into debate club about following stupid rules.
i agree Hereditary started out well but towards the end it almost turned into a parody of itself.
if you like Horror you may like:
why do you think i hate them ? i have even recommended them myself. well, not exactly - somebody on ( i think it was DIY Audio ) was asking for ideas with 3D printed speakers but was concerned with time to print and cost of the filament ( raw material for 3D printing ) and wanted to keep the speaker small for that reason - i told them to 3D print the front baffle of this Neumann and build the rear chamber out of MDF this way the 3D printed part wouldn’t use too much print time and material ( it would be mostly one round hole ) and you would still have a speaker that can’t easily be made without 3D printing due to the 3D waveguide …
no that’s not what i’m saying. there are many ways to enjoy music but rather i’m saying that they aren’t all equal. in the end the goal of listening to music is to experience emotion. whether the music makes you cry or gives you goosebumps or simply euphoria while dancing. if you have experienced SOMETHING then it was worth paying for.
and the amount you spend should be proportional to the experience you get NOT to how good the measurements look.
measurements do play a role in the overall experience, of course.
well i am on record saying that classical is over-rated. doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid type of music or that it can’t induce powerful emotion but rather that it tends to be the SAFE CHOICE for people who haven’t bothered to develop authentic taste but want to be recognized as having taste anyway so they default to classical music or Jazz or other more established types of music where they know nobody will say " haha you listen to that garbage ! "
it’s really same as with measurements - if you don’t trust your own judgement of what makes a speaker good you can always lean on measurements to “prove” that the speaker is good.
but if you do trust your own taste then the measurements don’t matter and you don’t need to listen to Jazz or Classical to prove that you have taste anymore. you can listen to anything you want on a speaker that measures, well, not as bad as Danley but certainly nowhere near the Neumann
in other words if you have confidence in your taste then " i like it " is all that matters whether it comes to music or speakers.
but admittedly taste must be developed, whether it comes to actual food, or music or speakers.
i did spend many years listening on studio monitors and i don’t regret it - it was necessary for me to understand what “accurate” sounds like, so that i can forget about it and never care about it again
for the amount of money these Neumanns run you might as well just go to the actual concert hall.
i mainly listen to electronic music - it ONLY exists played back through speakers so i don’t have such luxury.
and in fact modern music isn’t electronic - it is computer music. original electronic music was analog, while modern music is digital. and we are are about to transition to music generated by AI. so we are about to enter third generation of music that never existed as sound until it was played back through speakers.
if you are OK with dropping $3,500 to create ambience then more power to you.
the other day Andrew Tate tweeted that he “spent $135,000 on clothes today” … and this is a guy who wears nothing but swimsuit trunks while doing his podcasts or driving his cars … but apparently for him spending $135,000 on a pair of speedos is not a big deal so more power to him.
but if somebody asked me if they should spend $135,000 on a pair of underwear i would advise them against it … but if they had the money and really wanted that underwear and it was the best underwear ever in the end i would have to concede that there is nothing really wrong with that. just because i wouldn’t do it myself doesn’t mean they shouldn’t or that their choice isn’t valid.
it is possible to create one speaker that does everything. i was even contemplating building it, but was ultimately faced with the reality that i don’t even use the speakers i do have so going bankrupt to create something i would never use maybe not the brightest idea.
the challenge isn’t to create a perfect speaker - but to sell it.
the technology is there. combination of Array, Waveguide, DSP and cardioid allows us to, if desired, do pretty much anything we want to sound.
the speakers that actually exist though exist not because they are possible, but because there is a market for them.
and vice versa the speaker i described / designed ( and not going to build ) doesn’t exist because there is no market for it …
as i explained previously there isn’t even a single 2-way Circum-Aural headphone on the market even though it would be easy to make one that would surpass ALL headphones ever made - but there is no market. nobody wants good headphones. people just want expensive ones. to make something expensive you add some wood, marble etc.
well the measurements do look good.
one thing i forgot to mention is that 100db during rock concerts is time-averaged and a-weighted. which means that bass peaks can be far above 100db as a-weighting doesn’t count bass as much and peaks can obviously surpass average levels … furthermore music approximates pink noise which is bass-heavy plus there is additional house / harman curve applied to boost bass even further.
in other words even when sitting 1 meter away from these speakers and with 100hz crossover to subwoofer they would still strain to reach rock concert levels.
but you also wouldn’t want rock concert levels while writing or doing work and you said you are approximating a jazz club or a cafe and not a rock concert. so for that application there shouldn’t be any issue.
if you are sure this is what you want you would then just have to compare these speakers to offerings from Genelec and / or other Neumanns.
i think Genelec is slightly above Neumann due to their custom coaxial designs while Neumanns are slightly more generic. their flagship KH420
is almost a clone of a speaker i built in high school more than 20 years ago, which was also a 3-way with a fabric dome midrange and a 10" focal woofer ( admittedly mine didn’t have a waveguide or DSP ). it’s in the basement as well.
this is to say Neumann is good but not super ground breaking. Genelec was always more interesting, whether that makes it better or not i don’t know but they are certainly more popular.
it seems Neumann is leaning more on DSP while Genelec is leaning more on acoustical design. which is more important ? no idea.
if you could somehow compare them in real life that would be cool.
I think Genelec is probably better. This Neumann uses drivers that are a bit better than the ones Genelec uses, but I doubt it makes a huge difference. Genelec is better in terms of cabinet design. The aluminum zero-diffraction cabinets they use are badass. Genelec also has GLM, which is some of the best automated room correction software out there.