Neumann KH 310A Review (Powered Monitor)

[MarsianC#]

looks like Neuman is using DSP to boost the sealed woofers bass down to f3 and then they seem to let it run rather than cut it off.

Linkwitz transform and subsonic filter. No need for DSP here. Some opamps and you're good to go!

 

[andreasmaaan]

Thanks for the review.
Is this mainly a studio speaker? Or do people use it in far field domestic environments?

I think the vast majority of owners use it as a studio monitor.

 

[napilopez]

Measured response is consistent between Amir and Neumann from 10k to approx 18k, but otherwise there is little correlation between the frequency response dips and valleys. I wonder why?

It's just pushing the degree of accuracy you can expect from two different speakers on different measurement systems, really.

At this degree of refinement, those little peaks and dips can be anything from the microphone's inherent response, to calibration, to reflections off the measurement rig, to tiny differences in microphone placement.

For example, I once measured the same KH80 with two different Umik-1 microphones in my same setup and the responses were not identical due to the above reasons (the blue and white below, ignore the red curve).

The CTA 2034A (spinorama) standard considers a correlation of +/-1.5dB among different measurement sources to be good.

 

[ROOSKIE]

With a pair, how far back would you guess one could sit and it would still be loud enough?

Eyeballing Nueman's specs which seem to be trustworthy, I'd have to guess that 100db continuous and 110db peaks in a hifi set-up in a medium living room would be in play.
Not mind blowing but deff not shaby.

 

[richard12511]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Neumann KH 310A active monitor (speaker). It was kindly sent to me by the company for testing. I see it discounted to US $2,200 (each) as of this writing.

This is one dense and heavy 3-way speaker:

View attachment 94736

I was relieved to find "rack mount" ears to grab onto for lifting it:

View attachment 94737

Nice to see big heatsinks in the back indicating good amount of power on tap. Testing was performed with all the switches as you see.

What you don't see is a port.

Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.

The system performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of more or less 1%.

Temperature was 58 degrees F initially. Past experience indicates that there may be some impact on bass response of Neumann speakers so a second measurement was performed after heating up the room to 68 degrees (it dropped back to 64 at the end of testing).

Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.

Reference axis was the border between tweeter and midrange.

I consulted with Neumann on the results you see here.

Neumann KH 310A Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:

View attachment 94739

Response basically matches Neumann's published anechoic results, sans the slight shelving in low frequencies and that one dip. Their measurements also shows a dip but it is above 100 Hz. Cause of the dip is unknown and Neumann is investigating. It is not material though as the room impact will be massive in this region but it is nice to know where it is coming from.

Even with a little shelving which Neumann thinks is still related to temperature, response is quite flan on axis. There is as much as 0.7 dB error in my microphone by 20 kHz so with that taken into account, agreement with Neumann data is excellent.

Directivity is very good as seen by how closely the upper lines mirror each other and their difference as plotted down below.

Early window reflections are as a result very good:

View attachment 94740

While not the target for this speaker, if you were to use the speaker in far-field, domestic listening space, this would be the potential response:

View attachment 94764

I have not looked to see why it became more uneven than I expected. Still, we are talking speakers here and this is a very good response.
EDIT: I had the scales wrong. It was too zoomed in. Corrected.

Interpreting near-field response of the sound producing elements is always complicated by the port. Without it, we have rather textbook responses in KH 310A:

View attachment 94742

Notice that the dip around 80 Hz is still there so that is not an artifact of the complex process Klippel NFS uses to generate its anechoic response.

Distortion is kept well under control even at the higher 96 dBSPL@1 meter:

View attachment 94743

Very low bass creates a bit of issue with distortion exceeding 100%:
View attachment 94744

Beam width control is excellent but naturally a bit asymmetrical:

View attachment 94745

Here is the same as a contour:

View attachment 94746

Vertical directivity is very good due to use of mid-range and careful design:

View attachment 94747

Neuman KH 310A Near-field Speaker Listening Tests
I know many of you think that looking at the measurements biases you in listening tests. But I must say, the very first impression of what hits my face and ears is often a surprise. I figured the KH 310A would sound good but not this good! I always start with female vocals to see if their brilliance is reproduced without harshness. The KH 310A blew me away with how it managed this careful trick! I could not believe the level of clarity, balance, yet detailed sound with zero harshness or lispiness.

Best of all, I could turn up the level as high as I wanted. This created nothing but delight as I played some of my tracks with dynamic high frequency tones such as Gruzzo by Daniele Di Bonaventura and Alfredo Laviano:

The bass was absolutely clean. It was a delight to listen to what Neumann calls "DRY BASS." It was a relief to not hear bloated bass that would all of a sudden fall of a cliff when turned up.

To make sure there was enough of it though, I queued up the track Bad News by Melody Gardot:

Wow, wow, wow! This is some impressive bass coming out of this speaker! It was resonating not only my desk and chair but my entire loft! I cranked it way up and then I could detect a bit of distortion but if you were not looking for it, you would be plenty satisfied.

I wish I had a second one and time to sit back and listen for hours and hours. Nothing has sounded this impressive and dynamic on my workstation desk. I simply put the speaker on half inch of padding with no messing with alignment and any reason to reach for EQ. And received total, absolute pleasure.

Conclusions
Neumann KH 310A shows the dedication of the design team to absolute objective perfection. Somehow the recipe here goes even beyond that producing a combine sound that delighted me and glued a smile on my face that has yet to disappear. Yes, $4,400 for a pair of these speakers is a lot of money. What you get though is design engineers perfecting the sound reproduction and not leaving you with the job of EQ to get there. Elimination of bass port (I think) has resulted in very clean low frequency response.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I am going to strongly recommend the Neumann KH 310A Active Monitor. I live for days like this when a company cares to give us the best sound reproduction we can get.

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Wow! Definitely one of the best yet! Looks like near perfection! I actually think the Olive score is underrating it a bit, and my subjective spinorama judgeificator is never wrong.

 

[Zuccinho]

I had a pair on demo. The only reasons I didn’t buy them was I auditioned them alongside some Kii 3s and the imaging and soundstage on the latter was significantly sharper/better. In most other respects they seemed pretty close.

 

[ROOSKIE]

I had a pair on demo. The only reasons I didn’t buy them was I auditioned them alongside some Kii 3s and the imaging and soundstage on the latter was significantly sharper/better. In most other respects they seemed pretty close.

Send those Kii's in for testing !! (say maybe!)

 

[617]

Amir can you explain the plot of the separate tranducers? Obviously you aren't measuring them separately, and tweeter surely has more LF attenuation than shown. This is a general comment, I see this on all the measurements.

Thanks for reviewing a true high end speaker. I don't think you can do any better in this form factor.

 

[Zuccinho]

Send those Kii's in for testing !! (say maybe!)

In UK but, tbh, even if I lived next door to our illustrious host not sure I could part with them for a day! Seriously, like you, I’d be really interested to see what he makes of them.

 

[MarsianC#]

Obviously you aren't measuring them separately, and tweeter surely has more LF attenuation than shown.

Measuring in nearfield, e.g. at the cone/dome/port. Naturally all drivers are emitting sound, as it would require opening the speaker to disconnect the other drivers. Stereophile usually measures drivers seperatly, in case speakers with bi/tri amp terminals are measured.

Send those Kii's in for testing

German S&R Test

 

[richard12511]

@amirm how did the bass on this speaker compare to the bass on the F328Be? Going by your listening tests, it's hard to tell which you preferred(maybe slight edge to Neumann?).

I ask because, going by the subjective listening tests, I would expect their bass responses to be within the same ballpark, but going by the measurements, they're not even in the same city. My gut feeling is that the NFS missed a bit with the F328's bass. The measurements in this review correlate much better with what you heard.

 

[infinitesymphony]

Member @auralux recently bought both the Neumann KH310As and Genelec 8351Bs. That would make for a difficult choice. Reposting the room picture from the thread about it:

 

[LTig]

I don't know how to predict. A wild guess would be 6 to 9 feet.

I listen to my O300Ds at 11 feet and it's more than loud enough for my ears.

 

[Pearljam5000]

Member @auralux recently bought both the Neumann KH310As and Genelec 8351Bs. That would make for a difficult choice. Reposting the room picture from the thread about it:

Still waiting for his comparison

 

[infinitesymphony]

Still waiting for his comparison

Spent all day yesterday just getting everything setup right in the room and doing measurements. Today I just started really getting to listen. All I can say is WOW! They are different enough in tamber to definitely warrant using as an A/B pair in a mixing/mastering scenario. The imaging and clarity of both is beautiful. The smoothness of the frequency response of both is spooky good.

Both of these monitors are aimed at translation, and it sounds like his impression is along those lines -- a difference in timbre rather than anything night-and-day.

 

[Pearljam5000]

Both of these monitors are aimed at translation, and it sounds like his impression is along those lines -- a difference in timbre rather than anything night-and-day.

I wish the 8351B were priced the same as the KH310, I would have bought them 100%.

 

[Valentin R]

Great speaker

 

[infinitesymphony]

I wish the 8351B were priced the same as the KH310, I would have bought them 100%.

That's the real takeaway. The KH310A puts you in the same ballpark at almost half the price. Granted, you will have to handle DSP outside the box, but I believe you can DSP most if not all of the KH speaker line if you add the KH750DSP subwoofer. Or handle it like @auralux and use a miniDSP, or Equalizer APO, Sonarworks, etc.

 

[GimeDsp]

Nice! I love a 3 way with dome midrage.

 

[amirm]

Amir can you explain the plot of the separate tranducers? Obviously you aren't measuring them separately, and tweeter surely has more LF attenuation than shown. This is a general comment, I see this on all the measurements.

Sure. Speaker is used as connected normally which means all drivers are active as usual. What I do is move the microphone to within 1 inch or so of each driver (and port). That accentuates the output from that drive at the expense of the others given us a good idea of what driver is doing. Of course there is bleeding from others and hence the reason the tweeter response seems to go way down to bass. So you just need to ignore those regions.

As of late, I have been manually shifting the response from each source to get them more or less level. They don't match because the measurement distance can't be identical (between a woofer and tweeter for example due to their shapes).

We are really looking for gross issues in this graph then. For anything more specific, the spin is the real deal.