Neumann KH 150 Monitor Review

[frank.de]

120-120 II, O300, Kh 310.

 

[kharan]

I've compared the 120 II and the 150 in the absolute nearfield and in the living room.
The 150 is with much better midrange, so great and overall a little better transient reproduction. I prefer the 150 over a 120 II with 750!!!

Interesting, maybe the larger woofer integrates better with the tweeter than the smaller one. In any case, both measure very close above 150 Hz.

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

View attachment 370746View attachment 370747

I love the white stands. Did you build them yourself? I may try painting the stands that I have now.

Are you using the analog or digital inputs on the KH 750 sub?

 

[BrokenEnglishGuy]

with speakers with very low mid range distortion, is not better to have these with subwoofers at 80hz instead of a 3 way design? there are good woofers as mid ranges and i think in speakers less drivers is more, if they are good enough

 

[frank.de]

I love the white stands. Did you build them yourself? I may try painting the stands that I have now.

Are you using the analog or digital inputs on the KH 750 sub?

Yes, the stands are build by myself. 25 Euro each.
I am using the Adi 2 pro digital output, into 750 and then into 150

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

the 150 makes me speechless. Endgame style, lets see if the 310 ii is the real endgame.

I don't love the horizontal layout for home music listening. I'd love to see an 8 or 9 inch 2 or 3-way with vertical layout ...essentially a smaller HK 420. Neumann's answer to the Adam Audio S3V is what I'd be looking for as a "real endgame" solution.

 

[Count Arthur]

I don't love the horizontal layout for home music listening. I'd love to see an 8 or 9 inch 2 or 3-way with vertical layout ...essentially a smaller HK 420. Neumann's answer to the Adam Audio S3V is what I'd be looking for as a "real endgame" solution.

I would generally agree that "landscape" speakers look odd, unless they're on a mixing desk. However, I like how they look here, using a pair of subwoofers to make them "portrait", and their proportions rather like classic Yamaha or JBL 3 way speakers from the 70s":

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

I would generally agree that "landscape" speakers look odd, unless they're on a mixing desk. However, I like how they look here, using a pair of subwoofers to make them "portrait", and their proportions rather like classic Yamaha or JBL 3 way speakers from the 70s":

View attachment 370824

Looks like the 310's do stack nicely when the subs are placed on their sides. LOL. WAF score = 5%

 

[cEbNVDyfMy]

I would generally agree that "landscape" speakers look odd, unless they're on a mixing desk. However, I like how they look here, using a pair of subwoofers to make them "portrait", and their proportions rather like classic Yamaha or JBL 3 way speakers from the 70s":

View attachment 370824

I think these look ok. What stands are those? they seem to fit perfectly.

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

I think these look ok. What stands are those? they seem to fit perfectly.

They look like side-tables from IKEA. :-D

 

[Somafunk]

I think these look ok. What stands are those? they seem to fit perfectly.

They look like these legs I bought from Amazon to make my walnut side tables and desk,

 

[TylerR]

Looks like the 310's do stack nicely when the subs are placed on their sides. LOL. WAF score = 5%

Wrong wife lol

 

[frank.de]

This was before with 310

 

[holdingpants01]

View attachment 370912This was before with 310

Much better now!
But is it me, or white grills with black driver behind doesn't look white? I would prefer if Genelec or Neumann do a mix of colours, white boxes with black grills. It's a bit more jarring in Neumanns, because they have ports on the front, which will always look black anyway.
I did a quick mockup, on the left is what I would prefer to see. I'm pretty sure one could just ask for spare black grill and frankenstein something like that, to me it looks just more consistent.

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

I finally got around to getting my shiny new Neumann KH 150s placed on the stands this past weekend:

The tweeter-to-tweeter distance is 6 ft. Ear to tweeter is 7 ft, 9 in. I recorded some log sweeps from the listening position using REW and Acourate. I was quite surprised (and pleased) to see an initial ICCC value from Acourate of 96.3%.

The highest value I've measured (before adding digital room correction filters) was a little over 93%. I say "surprised" because placement in this undertreated room is asymmetric. I didn't think correlation above 93% was possible, even with a "perfect" transducer.

I built a quick 'n dirty set of FIR filters using Acourate and then re-measured with REW. Here's the before and after for amplitude at the listening position:

Before correction, the response was +/- 7.5 dB relative to my target. After, it's roughly +/- 1.5 dB. With the filters in place,, the F3 is ~26 Hz at the listening position. As a result, I don't see myself in any kind of rush to add a subwoofer for this room.

The step response was pretty good before correction, showing some reflections and phase issues due to reflections and asymmetry in the room:

I'm particularly impressed by how clean the initial step is. Time alignment between the mid-woofer and tweeter is extremely good out of the box. There's more I could do to improve the time domain response in Acourate, but I didn't go to the trouble since I'm still experimenting with placement. However, the results show a significant improvement over time-domain response that was not bad to start with:

None of this matters if they don't sound good. Of course, they sound amazing. It's crazy how much low-end is coming out of these small monitors. Soundstage is wide and very tall, but it does not seem to extend all of the way to the floor. (Could be my eyes/brain playing tricks on me due to the contrast between the white speakers and black stands.) Imaging is precise but a little squeezed with the speakers only 6 ft apart. I will try wider placement on the next iteration and report back. I've described the Neumann KH 150 to friends as a baby Dutch & Dutch 8c.

I've not had time to experiment with the MA 1 monitor alignment mic and software, but I have them...definitely on the list of things to play with...along with feeding them from the S/PDIF inputs. For now, I'm just enjoying the sound I'm getting from these things!

 

[Karmacoma]

I finally got around to getting my shiny new Neumann KH 150s placed on the stands this past weekend:

The tweeter-to-tweeter distance is 6 ft. Ear to tweeter is 7 ft, 9 in. I recorded some log sweeps from the listening position using REW and Acourate. I was quite surprised (and pleased) to see an initial ICCC value from Acourate of 96.3%.

View attachment 371749

The highest value I've measured (before adding digital room correction filters) was a little over 93%. I say "surprised" because placement in this undertreated room is asymmetric. I didn't think correlation above 93% was possible, even with a "perfect" transducer.

I built a quick 'n dirty set of FIR filters using Acourate and then re-measured with REW. Here's the before and after for amplitude at the listening position:

View attachment 371759

Before correction, the response was +/- 7.5 dB relative to my target. After, it's roughly +/- 1.5 dB. With the filters in place,, the F3 is ~26 Hz at the listening position. As a result, I don't see myself in any kind of rush to add a subwoofer for this room.

The step response was pretty good before correction, showing some reflections and phase issues due to reflections and asymmetry in the room:

View attachment 371752

I'm particularly impressed by how clean the initial step is. Time alignment between the mid-woofer and tweeter is extremely good out of the box. There's more I could do to improve the time domain response in Acourate, but I didn't go to the trouble since I'm still experimenting with placement. However, the results show a significant improvement over time-domain response that was not bad to start with:

View attachment 371753

None of this matters if they don't sound good. Of course, they sound amazing. It's crazy how much low-end is coming out of these small monitors. Soundstage is wide and very tall, but it does not seem to extend all of the way to the floor. (Could be my eyes/brain playing tricks on me due to the contrast between the white speakers and black stands.) Imaging is precise but a little squeezed with the speakers only 6 ft apart. I will try wider placement on the next iteration and report back. I've described the Neumann KH 150 to friends as a baby Dutch & Dutch 8c.

I've not had time to experiment with the MA 1 monitor alignment mic and software, but I have them...definitely on the list of things to play with...along with feeding them from the S/PDIF inputs. For now, I'm just enjoying the sound I'm getting from these things!

I'm curious about the comparison between spdif and xlr, only using xlr myself.

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

I'm curious about the comparison between spdif and xlr, only using xlr myself.

Difficult to find specs on the S/PDIF interface, but I recall reading somewhere, perhaps on this thread, that the only supported format is 24-bit, 48 kHz. That, or perhaps any other incoming sampling rates are internally resampled to 48 kHz. Would be nice to know for sure since I can have Roon's DSP engine do the resampling if that works best.

 

[IamJF]

Before correction, the response was +/- 7.5 dB relative to my target. After, it's roughly +/- 1.5 dB.

I would not EQ these dips in the 150-200Hz area that much. These are normally lambda/4 chancellations with some nearby surfaces (backwall?) and still chancel to some degree after EQing.

What EQ curve is your target curve? I'm using the LH120ii in Nearfield or very controlled rooms and my target curves are totally different! I'm more close to the Neumann target from MA1 but with 2dB more low end.
But seeing the speaker response in the reverberant room without EQ - pushing to this linear curve would probably be way to much. Looking forward to your trials with MA1 and what target curve you use then.

 

[Staki]

I'm curious about the comparison between spdif and xlr, only using xlr myself.

I was curious about the same thing myself and am currently waiting on a couple of coax cables. I hope I'll be able to test later this week. I am using MiniDSP SHD instead of MA1 for eq/Dirac and to integrate a non-Neumann subwoofer. MiniDSP uses 96 kHz internally and to the best of my knowledge, this is not configurable. We will see how KH 150 will deal with it. Will report the results. Realistically, I don't expect to be able to hear any difference, but we'll see.

The following sentence from KH 150 manual prompted me to go through this exercise:

If the signal source is based on internal digital signal processing, it is recommended that you choose a digital connection between the signal source and the loudspeaker. This eliminates the need for additional signal conversion from digital to analog in the source and from analog to digital in the loudspeaker

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

What EQ curve is your target curve?

The target curve is on that first plot in light green. I call this a "Bob Katz" curve. It has proven to be a good simple starting point for many systems. The shape is flat from DC to 1 kHz, then downward sloping to roughly -6 dB at 20 kHz.

The EQ is not as aggressive as it looks since I'm showing response with psychoacoustic smoothing. Cancellations from SBIR have very high Q, and I'm not boosting any frequencies. This plot shows how I'm not actually attempting to correct SBIR dips (high-Q dips are ~10 dB deep with 1/24th smoothing, but actually much deeper).

Important to note that these plots are not "simulated" from some room correction system. They are actual live measurements at the listening position with and without convolution. For plots with filters applied, I've saved a REW measurement sweep to a WAV file (example settings below). I then start the measurement process in REW and play the saved WAV file in Roon with the convolution filter engaged. Because REW is using acoustic timing reference, it waits until it "hears" the initial timing "chirp" before beginning the recording. This is the best way I've come up with to match acoustic measurements to how I actually play music on this system.

The measurements seem to be reasonably stable across a range of mic positions as long as I don't move the mic too far forward or back (which will pick up different room modes and nodes). What I'm hearing correlates very well to what I see on these plots. Hope this makes sense. Thanks for having a look!