SOUND ON SOUND

[Marbury]

Almost pulled the trigger on ordering these over my old Spirit Absolute 2s but reading the above experiences I think I'll pass.

[Sam Spoons]

I think you'll find a lot more happy customers than ones with issues. Get the signal level driving the speaker in the ballpark and it's highly unlikely you'd have a problem,

[Jorge]

Is there any downside to just not using the auto power feature and turning your whole system on before you use it and off when you finish? I do that with my KH120s and have never had a problem.

[Hugh Robjohns]

None at all.

[Jorge]

Great, thanks. I like the KH120s a lot but am considering getting the KH80s instead of KH120s for a small video studio at work. From all the reviews and discussion it seems the KH80s excel in the sound department but have had some issues in the clever digital trickery department.

[jjtmd]

I just purchased a pair of KH 80 monitors, they sound great, but my comments are regarding the auto standby feature, local control.
From the start one of the units failed to ever go into standby mode, ie the white light remained lit hours after I turned off my Apollo Twin. The other monitor shut itself down after roughly 90 minutes (white light not lit). So I swapped the two boxes, without swapping the input cords or power cords. In the new position the monitor still failed to power itself down (white light remained lit at all times).
As an aside, I'm grateful I don't have the opposite problem as reported above whereby the monitor shuts itself off while in playback mode, that would be intolerable. My issue is annoying, one feels that for the money spent the unit should function as designed, after all, the other monitor does.
The tech support at Sweetwater were kind enough to send a replacement, and guess what? A variation of the same problem, again I'm happy it doesn't ever reset itself during playback. But it does display a weird tendency to intermittently go to stand by appropriately, other times the white light remains lit, for hours. There's no pattern I can discern. Again, I swapped the boxes and the replacement monitor does the same thing in the new position on the desk.
To be clear, I am not attached to a network, this is a local control issue.
So it seems the problem has to do with threshold settings, both to power down to auto stand by, and for some unlucky customers, to fail to remain on despite a strong input.
Thoughts anyone?

[Hugh Robjohns]

I wonder if there is ground noise or interference causing the shutdown detector to keep retriggering?

Do the two monitors still behave so differently if you disconnect the audio cables from their inputs?

[jjtmd]

If I pull the input cable from the monitor that keeps waking up inappropriately, it stays asleep, so yes, I think you are correct. This morning when I got up the monitor was in standby (white light not lit). A few minutes later I walked by my desk and noticed it had woken up (white light lit), so I wonder if that had something to do with turning on lights elsewhere in the house? Tomorrow AM I will check out that possibility.

[jjtmd]

I received a replacement KH 80 (the second replacement) a few days ago, and it works as designed, ie it goes into auto standby mode appropriately.

[Hugh Robjohns]

:thumbup: :clap:

[blinddrew]

Interestingly* one of mine went into standby mid-play last week. Hasn't happened again but nervously keeping an eye on it now.


* Probably only for this audience. ;)

[Hugh Robjohns]

Hmmm.... this auto power feature does seem to be a weak point, doesn't it? I can excuse, to a degree, false wake-ups caused by electrical noise on the line. But false shut-downs when in use is much more troubling...

[blinddrew]

Only happened once in 18 months ish (I can't actually remember where I got these) so not overly concerned at the moment. I can always turn the auto-standby off - they're not exactly a heavy power drain.

[Kayvon]

I've basically written off my KH80s now. It's really difficult to pin down intermittent faults like these. To buy the speakers again from Neumann at a reduced price is not something I'm particularly keen on doing having coughed up already.

It's funny, at the time I was keen on investing in a set of speakers that would last for a good long period of time. The Neumanns didn't make it much past 2 years.

I do appreciate that things can go wrong over time and typically I'm not one to buy new technology when it's first been released but since it was Neumann I forewent that prudence. Ah well.

[Kayvon]

Perhaps my previous post is a bit toys out the pram. They still work as monitor speakers without the auto-standby mode but the other annoying thing for me was that they never implemented the negligible latency mode.

Since my cumulative latency (Ableton Live I'm looking at you) was causing me recording issues (still does tbh) I was intent on cutting out any latency wherever possible. The extra monitoring latency on top of everything I could've done without.

Sometimes I think music technology is less of a hobby and more of a battle :headbang: