Recording - November 2017 - 39

In use

The KH 80 DSP is rated at 3 dB
down at 57 Hz and 6 dB down at 53
Hz, not at all unreasonable for a 4"
woofer. In practice, I was pleasantly
surprised by the quality of the bass
response on these little speakers; as
is common with a well-designed long
throw woofer, the accuracy and clarity
of higher harmonic content allows the
brain to "fill in" the missing fundamental
with a fair bit of consistency. While the
KH 80 DSP doesn't thump you in the
chest as you might expect from a larger
speaker's low end, you're never given
the impression that the bass is limited
or strangled. It speaks with authority
and detail, to the point where checking
my mixes on much larger speakers
required fairly little adjustment in the
lowest lows.
With a 1.8 kHz crossover frequency,
the woofer handles most of the critical
low midrange, so the performance in
that region is very smooth to my ears.
There's lots of really deep detail in
subtle sources like 12-string guitar,

plectrum-picked bass, and electric piano.
I was a little bit concerned that vocals
and lead instruments would be adversely
affected by the crossover frequency
setting, but I needn't have worried;
there are no audible artifacts in the
crossover region, and vocals tend to
float out front of dense arrangements in
a beautiful way.
The highs that the KH 80 DSP delivers
are simply divine... clear and intricately
detailed without being spitty or metallic.
The tweeter is rated at ±3 dB out to a
very respectable 21 kHz, and one
wouldn't expect much beyond that
simply because of the DSP's internal 48
kHz sampling rate. (The converters are
24-bit, by the way.) Hand percussion,
orchestral percussion, cymbals, all translated wonderfully.
As is common with KH monitors, the
sweet spot was quite wide and forgiving
thanks to the MMD waveguide on the
tweeter, and imaging and soundstaging
were precise within a reasonably-sized
area. Neumann gives a lot of suggestions on how to set up these speakers

in a multichannel surround array, and
suggests center channel or rear surround applications in smaller rooms as
being appropriate for the KH 80 DSP.
With the tight imaging I was hearing on
my stereo pair, I can well believe that
a properly-placed set of these speakers
would be wonderful for surround.

Final thoughts

I admit to being a little bit disappointed
to learn that the ship date for Neumann.
Control had slipped into next year,
making it impossible for me to test the
speakers in a networked configuration
or remotely control their time alignment
or room response. But hey, I would
rather the software be done properly
than quickly, and this leaves the door
open for a future followup review where
I check out the software and networking
in detail.
I won't be sorry to ask for another
pair of KH 80 DSP monitors when that
time comes; these are amazingly sweet
little speakers, and I'll be sorry to see
them go.
http://www.cloudmicrophones.com
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