I find it odd that the tonal balance of my plain KH310 monitors is rather "dark" in my rather reflecting room, being it opposed to the rather "bright" tonal balance that my hi fi speakers (to name them: sonus faber concertino and elac adante) instead express.
Taken for granted that the neumanns exhibit a flat FR in anechoic conditions, and that the FR of the 2 hi-fi speakers should not be so far away from it (at least in terms of overall slope), I'm left with blaming a very different directivity of the monitors for such a substantial tonal difference.
As much as the timbre of the monitors is way more accurate than the timbre of the other 2 speakers (confirming the much higher smoothness and flatness of their anechoic FR and their better controlled directivity), I find the tonal balance ot the hi-fi speakers to be the correct one, if not just a little too bright, whereas the monitors sound definely too much on the dark side.
The point is, that I have spent countless hours trying to find a proper EQ and "house curve" to apply to the combo consisting of the monitors + their KH750 subs using Equalizer APO, based on countless measurements done with REW and calibrated mic, to no avail. Anything I do to improve the overall tonal balance seems to spoil the timbrical precision.
In the end, I surrended and let the dedicated "MA-1" neumann monitor calibration suite do the job, and don't ask me why (because I can't figure it out), it manages to do in a breeze what I couldn't achieve after months of testing and trials using REW.
So, my take off is that there must a way to properly eq speakers to get both a tonally and a timbrically balanced response (read: all intruments sound like they should, and I don't feel the need to touch the tone controls from track to track, form music to speech/movies, etc. - everything I throw at the speakers now seems to sound just right, included badly recorded material). And it must not be so difficult if it can be done automatically by a software algorithm. I mean: MA-1 found the correct tonal balance immediately, it did not preceed by trial and error, or by "taste". It proposed a very simple "house curve", and that was exactly the correct one, at first try.
So, what is that MA-1 does so well, that I cannot get manually even after months of measurements and infinite trials with REW and a generic parametric equalizer? To me this is still a mystery.