The reality is that this speaker is neither designed for or marketed
The reality is that this speaker is neither designed for nor marketed for consumer use.
The basic sales pitch for this product is:
"The KH 420 is designed for use as a mid-field or main monitor in stereo and multi-channel systems. It can be used in project, music, broadcast centers, and post production studios for tracking, mixing, and mastering."
You will not find any supplier suggesting it is sensible for domestic playback use.
If you look at professional reviews online, they say this speaker requires a lot of room treatment, which makes it a poor choice for a typical consumer set-up were that is not possible.
Neumann's own website says:
View attachment 203803
For a speaker this powerful, and expensive, I would expect in a typical domestic setting the listening position to be close to the limit or outside this specified working distance. Moreover, having these speakers at one end of a domestic room and the listening position near the other end is, but all accounts, going to be pretty terrible unless the room is well treated.
So, whilst this is clearly a superb studio monitor for professional use, for someone with a $10k+ budget and a nice big domestic listening room, this would seem to be a poor choice of speaker.
So there is good reason why they are not sold for consumer use and I did not see anyone online using them in a domestic setting.
So if you look at this review, for example, from a professional user near me (
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7M3A1FYucU), the Kii3 would be a much more sensible option and they are of course sold for domestic use.
With a large listening room, I would much prefer a speaker designed for domestic use (whether or not the FR-30) and I would expect it to perform better than a midfield monitor, even one with great measurements.
Plus this is dead ugly. Generally, domestic audio consumers pay for cosmetics because they don't want their houses invaded by horrible industrial products. There are horrible consumer products as well, but these give zero consideration to cosmetics, whilst the Kii 3 do.