Help me decide

[muslhead]

I am planning on upgrading the front l&r speakers in my av room and at first, had it all figured out what i was going to purchase but, after reading another thread here, i got to thinking and the decision became muddled. Was hoping to toss this out and see which option would win out by those much smarter than me
The speakers need to be bookshelf size.
AVR room is 11x18ft and acoustically well treated. Seating is about 8-9ft from front, center and subs.
Just a 5.2 setup with 2-15" rythmik subs, infinity rc263 center, tbd front left and right with a pair of revel m16 rears.
Electronics is emotiva emc2 pre/pro feeding 5 channels of hypex class d amps.

Its important to mention i use the room about 90% for movies and the remaining for mch audio. My main 2channel audio system is downstairs

I had decided on the new ascend acoustic lx. Their power handling and posted (but not yet 3rd party confirmed) piqued my interest. At $1500 i thought i would give them a chance. Not gonna kill me financially if they dont turn out to be as good as they purportedly measure.

But now the conundrum ... I read the thread on the to be released neumann 120ii's and got to thinking. I have version one in my office with their sub and, in that room, it is the best sounding setup, i have ever heard. Ever. So i have a special place in my ears for Neumann. The office system is nearfield so there are no room issues to deal with and probably a major contributor to my infatuation. ( As a reference point, i have a pair of Dutch 8c with 2 dual monolith subs in the adjacent room but my office is so much better ... to me). Of course, for movies and the avr room, the fronts play such a small part in the experience, so would either speaker stand out as the best choice. Would it even matter?

So, my two options i am stewing are the ascend at $1500 or the new 120ii's at $2000. I will be able to sell the amp to offset the cost differential so there is cost motivation in my decsion. So with two unverfied but likely excellent speaker choices what should the decision be based upon? .... nothing flip a coin?. Looks? Build? I will not be able to compare them in my room. I was concerned with max output but if their spec is final, i dont see any way it would be pushed too hard. What else am i missing that i should be considering?

 

[teashea]

Well, you have laid out some various options. Personally I like Neumann monitors for my purposes - ie music production studio. In addition to KH310's and KH150's, I have a pair of KH120A's/KH750 and another pair of KH120A's.

I think that the KH120's are excellent for nearfield monitor use. I would not purchase them for midfield or farfield use - especially not for movies. They are simply not designed for that. For movies I would suggest Klipsch.

 

[muslhead]

Well, you have laid out some various options. Personally I like Neumann monitors for my purposes - ie music production studio. In addition to KH310's and KH150's, I have a pair of KH120A's/KH750 and another pair of KH120A's.

I think that the KH120's are excellent for nearfield monitor use. I would not purchase them for midfield or farfield use - especially not for movies. They are simply not designed for that. For movies I would suggest Klipsch.

Thanks. was wondering if they could handle the dynamics of movies
One vote for the ascend.

 

[LTig]

Thanks. was wondering if they could handle the dynamics of movies
One vote for the ascend.

Not really. The Ascend is a bookshelf similar to the Neumann and its woofer is just slightly larger so I would not expect lots of more SPL.

 

[muslhead]

Not really. The Ascend is a bookshelf similar to the Neumann and its woofer is just slightly larger so I would not expect lots of more SPL.

How much spl do you expect to be needed? the nuemann has a max spl of 115db (i think i remember seeing)
I have not seen the specs for max spl yet on the ascend (once received it will address your point. I have sent an email to ascend asking this question.) But even so and lets say they are similar, i dont see how 115db is not enough and as such why both speakers wouldnt work. Especially when considering the xover by dirac to push the low end frequencies to my subs. I doubt i would exceed 100db at the volumes i listen.
I know the 115 is way more than enough for the mch audio. Just a bit unsure of what could be expected for movies.
I

 

[Brookeville]

Hi, there muslhead! I like your attitude of opening up your "musl" (and your head) to hear what other heads might contribute.
I am impressed with DUAL Rythmic 15" subs in your listening 18 x 11 listening room. WOW! Listening to the soundtrack from Jurassic Park must be both immersive and visceral when the bigger dinosaurs are walking! My background in audio dates back several years and includes a fair amount of both purchasing and building electronics and speakers. In the realm of speakers, there are SO many very good choices, some mass marketed, some very esoteric($$$), some just strange! You made the statement that your room was acoustically treated but I'm not sure exactly what that means. Here is what I've learned; If your average size listening room is made up of more than 1 pair of hard parallel surfaces, then no matter what brand /model speakers you purchase regardless of price, you will be listening to your room interacting with the speakers as much or more than the speakers themselves. Question: Have you ever thought of purchasing a tone-generating software app ($50.00) and a small hand-held decibel meter or reasonable quality($150.00) and playing back a detailed set of tones and making decibel measurements for several tones at 1/3 an octave (20 Hz is one octave below 40Hz, etc.) or less between each tone from 20 Hz to about 12 or 13.5KHz to first see what "room modes" may/do exist and determining if you have any serious resonance or null issues that will muddy the sound of any good speakers, making sure that your listening room is not grossly exaggerating or absorbing any individual or groups of frequencies by more than 3 decibels, relative to the speaker's measured response? (i.e., 35Hz - 20KHz +/- 3 db usually measured in an anechoic or acoustically innert test chamber). If you can get access to a graph of your speaker's detailed frequency response you can even improve the room response info by subtracting/adding the decibels shown by the peaks and dips in your speaker's tested response. All rooms are a little different but a typical rectangular shaped room with at least parallel front & rear walls and maybe parallel hard surface floor and ceiling will most likely suffer from what are called "early reflections" that will exaggerate some frequencies from the sidewalls at 3 or 4 ft back from the speakers. You may also findout that once you equalize the environment to anything even close to a "flat" response that you really don't care for the way any speakers sound in relations to what you've been listening to for some time. I took a look at both the Focal and Neumann freq. responses/data and both look pretty good. My impression was that the Neuman seemed like it was being promoted more for nearfield listening(while working at a laptop and sitting very close to the speakers. (i.e "Feasable listening distance - 2.6 to 12 ft.????'I never hear of any Hi-Fi speakers being promoted this way. Also their acoustic output measurements in dbs were being touted as 105db, but that was a very close distance then at just a few meters the output dropped to 87 db) I didn't get that same impression with the Focal. Historically, Focal, a French company started out making speaker components(woofers, mids, tweeters) for other HI-Fi speaker manufacturers. Good luck.

 

[teashea]

Neumann's are designed as nearfiled studio monitors.

 

[LTig]

Neumann's are designed as nearfiled studio monitors.

KH420 is midfield.

 

[muslhead]

After posting this question, instead of buying one from my narrowed list, i purchased a pair of the jbl708p.
HT-wise, they are great using the built in dsp and @Maiky76 's filters. I am pretty disappointed though, when listening to purely audio. They are on the bright side for my personal tastes

 

[Brookeville]

To ALL of you who (like me) have jumped on the train headed to "Ultimate Speakerville" in response to your love of good musical reproduction, I offer the following:

I am almost six decades into an amateur speaker building hobby acquired at age 14. Good sounding speakers became dope for me. I've probably spent too many hours reading about, playing with, and studying the science and art of building speakers. I have come to accept what professionals have said for decades about assessing any speaker's performance, and that is, "In the end, trust your ears." I will embellish this by adding five key words, as follows; "In the end, trust your ears, relative to the listening environment."

PLEASE, indulge me here and you will get my point better through a story about someone whose name you will likely recognize. The story is related to the work of Dr. Amar Bose (yes, THAT Dr, Bose) who in the 1960s founded an audio company based upon his graduate research at MIT that made him a fortune in the audio industry and continues successfully today, more than 10 years after his death at 83 in 2013. Amar Bose surveyed hundreds of different people, of all ages and had them listen to the same musical recordings on multiple speaker designs played in the same listening room. The only statistically valid conclusions his studies reached had nothing to do with measures of sonic accuracy. His findings however, clearly demonstrated a statistically valid preference for REFLECTED sound vs. direct sound. Dr. Bose's work and expertise was in the field of "psycho-acoustics," the perception of sound by the brain. His subjects could never statistically agree on which speaker was more accurate in the same listening environment, but showed clear preferences for the exact same music when the majority of the sound was reflected (a reverberant field) vs. direct, Reflected sound convinces the brain that the listening environment is perceptually much larger than the actual listening space. Thus his listeners consistently expressed higher levels of pleasure when they percieved that their listening environment had expanded. Bose went on to create a company whose early designs regularly used inaccurate drivers that required large amounts of equalization to cover the entire range of sound.

I have read more than a few stories where highly experienced and respected speaker design engineers have followed the science and physics of accurate sound reproduction, employing the best test instruments and analytical software to develop the most "accurate" speakers possible. Then, in their final listening tests, they invariably determine that "something in the speaker's "sonic signature" is either missing or exaggerated. To rule out their own subjectiveness, they pick other trusted engineers/designers to have a listen after they review of all calculations and analysis. In essence, very rarely are the designers completely happy with their final beta design even though everything in the development effort had completely followed all the science and strict measurement standards. Their ears and brains, no matter how well trained, are still subject to "psychoacoustic environmental bias" In short, you are NEVER listening to ANY speaker alone. You are always subjecting yourself to how your speakers are interacting with your listening room/environment. Finally, the ear and brain are much more sensitive to sudden peaks or dips in response made only worse by increasing bandwidth than they are to gradual increases/decreases (smoother response variations over a group of adjacent frequencies.

BOTTOM LINE: There are NO perfect speakers because there are no perfect listening rooms. TRUST your own ears. They are usually always right there with you!