Minimum distance for hifi listening, maximum of studio monitor? not sure.What is "nearfield hifi listening"? Is this opposed to "nearfield studio listening"? How?
If you are able, try sitting a number of feet back from where you normally listen to them. Does it sound better?I have 2 burning questions which made me register at this site.
First, regarding the overwhelming love for genelec and neumann on this site.
I owned both and used to love the speakers a lot. But as I explore more, I found these speakers to be flawed for nearfield hifi listening.
The genelecs are great for first impression. But as I live longer with them, they appear too bright. The treble too hot for me. I saw a thread on desktop setup and is amaze that so many uses them for a desktop setup. Genelecs with YouTube videos is just too unbearable.
Neumann is even worse than genelec in my opinion. The bass is great and it's treble not as hot as genelec, but the sound is so sterile. Listen to voices and the neumann suck all emotions out. If you don't listen to acoustics I guess it's fine then. The neumann is very suitable for hip hop.
Now, I know both speakers measures very well (especially the neumanns), but I personally cannot live with them in my setup.
AFAIK in the recording studio, nearfield monitors usually sat on top of the meter bridge of an analog mixer. This means between 1 to 1.5 meters away from the engineer, because that's the range of depths for most mixers. This is true even with todays desktop workstations, in which the nearfield monitors are aligned with the LED monitors, which is my case is 1 meter away.Minimum distance for hifi listening, maximum of studio monitor? not sure.
Traditionally, hifi is put on the living room. Normally the loudspeaker are to throw off at longer distance. Minimum distance the least distance to hear for all the driver interaction. Usually it is further than studio monitor.But I don't know if and how "nearfield hifi listening" differs.
God, even the new ones sound awful. Piercing bright.If you want to hear what bright sounds like then listen to PMCs... Omg
Bit of a thread hijack, but any chance you can share a bit more as I'm looking at this exact set-up. Does the sub add much (for casual listening, not necessarily mixing and professional applications). Also do you have much hiss or white noise from the set-up?
I have to agree with the bolded part.I'll agree that Genelecs are voiced rather bright. It's popular (though not necessarily what you want) for studio monitors, while speakers for domestic playback tend to be tilted down a bit more.
Keep in mind, most of the Genelecs have really pretty looking measurements, and there are a lot of people here who will buy whatever measures best on the Klippel and force themselves to listen to it. As a hint, setup and room acoustics are everything, and you can make a Genelec speaker sound like an absolute dumpster fire.
For monitors, it's more even more complicated. Keep in mind, a typical control room != a typical listening environment. Most studios will have some real thought put into acoustic treatment, and it's seldom as simple as "buy a monitor and chuck it on the meter bridge". Tweaking of active crossovers is not unheard of. Monitors should also be able to handle recordings that have not had dynamics processing yet - power compression is a real issue.
Long story short, speakers are complicated. Measurements and models are a useful tool, but as is so often the case with engineering, it's easy to go down the modeling rabbit hole and spend a month doing theoretical computations, only to be slapped in the face by reality. The best speaker for one room is not necessarily the best speaker for another room.
I've heard speakers that ASR hates sound absolutely fantastic, and I've heard speakers that ASR loves sound like dog dung. Everyone has a different room and different preferences. Does that mean you should ignore the measurements? Absolutely not - they're a good place to start, but you have to learn exactly what they mean for your particular use case. The fact that you dislike both the Genelecs and the Neumanns is not surprising, since they have very similar characteristics.
They measure well and are engineered excellently. That's about it.
I completely share your sentiments for Neumanns, notably the KH120. Lack of resolution and lack of stereo depth/width for me. For a monitor this is not a bad thing, though.
Resolution, depth, etc are things that are hard to measure, the standard suite of measurements can give only hints IME.What part of the measurements point to lack of resolution / stereo depth?
Or am I misunderstanding a subjective experience?