ASR measures the Neumann KH150

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

well, and which one makes female vocals sexier :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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.

i doubt the diffraction between Genelec and Neumann is very different, i mean overall cabinet shape is fairly similar.

i was wondering what all that SAM ( Smart Active Monitor ) was about.

To be able to measure the actual speaker in the actual environment and then download the calibration to the speaker’s internal DSP is a big deal IMO.

not only is every room different but every driver and speaker is also different due to manufacturing tolerances. i don’t know if Neumann calibrates every speaker’s DSP individually or not but without such calibration every speaker would measure differently.

and what do you care if some other unit measured flat in some other room ? you want YOUR unit to measure flat in YOUR room.

A DSP that isn’t user tunable really doesn’t offer much advantage over a good analog crossover on the other hand. I don’t know what that Neumann offers but if it’s just the basic tone controls like +/- 3db boost or cut here and there then it’s the same thing that analog monitors like my Mackies always offered.

In fact my pops had passive speakers back in Kiev that had those adjustments, so this is legacy stuff.

using DSP as simply a more expensive substitute for analog circuits is not that smart. yes i understand FIR can do stuff analog can’t but i’m not sure if it is audible. on other hand room EQ is definitely going to be audible.

but again, as i said, if you want to be able to EQ a null at around 100 hz or so you will need a powerful speaker. these tiny speakers are already working hard even before any bass boost. and if you later move to another room that has a deeper null you can’t digitally increase the size and power of a speaker. on other hand if you get something like VTX F35 you have the power and you can always re-tune the DSP later … of course that’s another extreme. it would have been nice to have something in-between as an option.

the other advantage of Genelecs is the coaxial design, which means your FR is more consistent vertically …

the typical crossover at about 2 khz is right in the middle of everything - it is a very important frequency range. i suppose DSP filters can have very steep slopes and minimize the damage there, but coaxial could all but eliminate it.

in fact with a coaxial DSP design you can even overlap the response of the tweeter and midrange in order to shape the off-axis response ! in other words if the directivity doesn’t exactly match you could hand over gradually from one to the other and eliminate a sharp step in off-axis response. not sure it would be useful in practice but the combination of coaxial and DSP does offer possibities.

here is David Gunness of Fulcrum Acoustic talking about “temporal equalization” which is really his brand name for using FIR DSP in conjunction with Coaxial Drivers:

there are also parts 2 and 3 of this video series you can find on the same YouTube page.

coaxial drivers may not have on-axis response that is as smooth but that can be EQd whereas spatial response can’t be.

there have to be places you can check these Genelecs out.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com

B&H has Genelecs “on display” in store, but even though i been there many times i never tried to listen to speakers there, so i don’t know how it works - you can call them and ask.

by the way if you look closely the best Genelecs:

and the best JBLs:

you should notice some similarities :wink:

both have slot loaded woofers above and below a tightly integrated mid-tweeter module.

and both are designed to work with subs.

because great minds think alike !

it’s just that one speaker is more optimized towards accuracy and another towards SPL. but both represent excellent engineering IMO.

the JBL M2 on other hand is sort of confused about what it’s purpose in life is … is it a PA speaker ? is it a studio monitor ? is it a home high-end speaker ? maybe to somebody that’s exactly what they need … but the M2 seems more like a candidate for cloning than an actual speaker anyone should consider buying. the fact that it doesn’t fit any market means it’s a low volume speaker and as such the price can’t ever be good.

of course neither Genelec SAM nor JBL VTX are cheap but at least they represent the pinnacle of engineering whereas the M2 is more like a trickle down version of something like VTX in my opinion, even if it is better suited for home use maybe …

also think of resale value.

it’s easier to sell something that has a reputation for excellence, than something which may be excellent but nobody knows about it.

i once got a deal where Beats headphones were included as a free bonus with something else. i sold them immediately without opening and got good money for them. they were obviously trash but they were easy to sell because everybody knew what they were.

between Neumann, Genelec and VTX i think i would rather be trying to sell the Genelec as everybody knows what it is and it is a self contained system.

everybody knows what JBL is but VTX F35 is not a self-contained system. it can’t be easily integrated into just any random setup. even if i sold it with matching Crown I-Tech amps only folks with other VTX gear would really be willing to pay a good price to complete their setup with matching speakers. and those types of customers might not even be looking at used market. shipping could get expensive too.

not sure how many people have even heard of Neumann, and even those that did would probably be willing to accept some substitute from another brand if it was cheaper.

whereas with Genelec it’s a name people recognize as a leader you can set it up in any room regardless of what other equipment you use, so that should make selling easier. probably you could have somebody pick them up locally.

remember everybody signing up to gym on January 1st thinks they will keep training consistently but 90% of them never come back even after buying a 3-year commitment plan.

you must have an exit strategy !

I think the M2 was designed to be a mid field monitor for studios, but it became popular in home audio as well. It’s just a very well engineered full-range floor standing speaker. It was also a project for JBL to work on horn geometry and transducer design and have something to show for it. It’s too different of a product than the VTX to compare.

JBL has a passive speaker that’s roughly equivalent called the 4367. It is tuned higher and would cross over better with a sub. It also uses better drivers.

It also costs $8000 a speaker. Another good candidate for cloning.

I don’t see why you don’t just build a perfect speaker if you think you know how. It sounds like a fun project.

This Neumann would also be easy to clone. Just use one of those Purifi midwoofers and a good tweeter and 3D print a baffle with a waveguide and you are good to go. You can just use a MiniDSP as the crossver.

Forget about cloning the Genelec.

they must have gotten tired of everybody ripping them off.

you had mackie ( mine ) ripping them off then behringer ripping off the mackie …

they probably came up with this new design at least in part to make it hard to copy …

anyway i’m out to gym, will be back after around 10:30 pm EST …

to some extent money is a problem … but it’s not the biggest problem.

a bigger problem is that i don’t actually need speakers - fine with headphones - but that is also not the biggest problem.

the biggest problem of all is simply lack of motivation to do anything at all.

you have to understand i haven’t worked or shaved in about 15 years.

the reasons are too complicated but ultimately it’s lack of motivation …

i might be bipolar … sometimes i have flashes of motivation … for example a few days ago groypers on Twitter were talking about some OnlyFans model and while they were bitching about how wrong OnlyFans is i just picked her up from Twitter and got her to agree to meet me in real life and she was excited about it … mere hours later i slid back into depression and remembered that i quit dating over a decade ago and vowed never to do it again.

not the first time it happened either. sometimes when i recognize instagram models in the real world i start to hit on them and they pretty much always get wet, then right after that i’m like what am i doing - stop it ! you were having a manic episode ! my mission isn’t to date models - it is to hate myself, hate my life and wait for death !

the thing with women is if you believe you’re good enough they will go with it, and when i am having my manic episodes i believe in that moment that i really am good enough for a model with hundreds of thousands of followers so i just approach her and everything goes great - but later when my mania wears off i’m like WTF was that ? what was i doing ? LOL

designing speakers is a bit like this as well. when i am manic i will design a system that exceeds anything ever designed by an order of magnitude in every possible way ( i design cars too ) then when the mania wears off i’m like - you don’t even use the speakers you have idiot ! why would you need one that 50 times more advanced ?

i think what is happening is my brain knows that the reality of life is horror and death and that’s where i am 90% of the time but sometimes when i am either daydreaming about speakers or cars or when i see a famous instagram model in real life ( usually this happens in gyms, but also happened in a pool once where i just so happened to be the best swimmer ) suddenly my brain seems to go this isn’t real world - it’s a fantasy - just like when you’re daydreaming about speakers - in this fantasy you are god, and i just project this god image and these hoes fall for it instantly.

then an hour later i’m like but i’m not a god, i’m a cockroach and deserve nothing.

i mean it’s it’s literally the same with speakers. LOL.

i honestly believe that when i am depressed i am sane, and when i am manic i am not sane.

in other words i believe that i am sane when i do absolutely nothing and wait for death and i’m insane when i accomplish without any effort things others can only dream of.

look at Sam Bankman Friend - was he sane when he became the richest 20-something in the world ? no he wasn’t because now he will go to prison for it.

same here - if i were to actually take those models out at some point i would have to face the fact that i am not God and i was merely feeling that way at the moment because i was the most impressive person in that building at that time even though in the grand scheme of things i am not even that good.

so to me sanity is when i remember how futile everything is and am depressed. and insanity is when i am excited focusing on the greatness that is possible.

tell me the dimensions of your room, your budget, what type of material you will be playing on your system and how loud / bass heavy you like it and i will tell you what you can DIY towards that end …

that way you will be living my insanity while i don’t have to hate myself for losing my grip on reality again …

Robert Greene in his books calls this “losing a sense of proportion” which is how great people meet their downfall …

if i actually built my designs or took those models out that’s what i would be doing … losing a sense of proportion and meeting my downfall.

however luckily you refuse to listen to my words of wisdom anyway so you wouldn’t really be losing anything by building my designs because if you don’t you will just build something else that is worse :slight_smile:

it’s like i have done steroids before but i wouldn’t do them again … but i would gladly put some kid on them to see how big i can get him :slight_smile:

same with putting you on my speaker designs LOL

I don’t buy it. LOL. You don’t even know what a spinorama is. A good speaker isn’t merely one that can get loud.