Over the course of a few months, a friend of mine had been gently prodding me, asking me if I’d take an honest listen to some new high end studio monitors from Germany. I’m always hesitant to write loudspeaker reviews, especially for expensive gear. As the dollar amount goes up, so do my expectations for performance and reliability. Ultimately his methods paid off, and I decided to take the KSD A200mk2s for a spin.
I was unfamiliar with KSD Studio Monitors prior to writing this review, and would guess many of you non-Germans are as well. KSD is based in Saarbrücken, Germany, and has been designing and manufacturing professional loudspeakers for over 25 years. All speakers are meticulously crafted in-house, and all speaker parts are sourced locally, with the exception of a couple of specialized components, such as the tweeter, that come from a family-owned boutique loudspeaker parts manufacturer. So, they’ve been around for quite some time and have been curating speakers from the highest quality parts they can find or fabricate. So far, so good.
The KSD A200mk2 is an active 3-way loudspeaker with a 10-inch driver, 3-inch midrange dome, and 1-inch tweeter. Though at first glance they appear to be sealed cabinets, the A200mk2s have two narrow, rectangular ports on the rear designed to optimize performance with a minimal boost at the resonant frequency (around 2 dB as opposed to the 5 to 7 dB boost found in many other ported speakers). The A200mk2 has analog and digital inputs (up to 32 bit/192 kHz) plus some added DSP functionality features baked into the speakers and are available in cherry wood or black finishes. The speakers arrived at our studio in two large boxes, and they also sent me the KSD-RC remote control, which is essentially a monitor controller, but it does quite a bit more (more on that later).
Our place, B-24 Studios, has two excellent control rooms. Studio A has pairs of ATC SCM45As and Genelec 1031As, both of which are tied to a Trinnov Audio [Tape Op #162] system for room calibration. Studio B also has a pair of 1031As plus a set of Barefoot MiniMain12, with no room calibration. In a perfect world, I would have liked to put the A200mk2s up side by side against the ATCs, which are also 3-way speakers. However, due to the Trinnov situation, I didn’t want to push my luck with the gremlins that do their job inside that box, so I decided Studio B would be the best place to try the A200mk2s out. I spend quite a bit of time in both and tend to reference mixes I’m working on between the rooms and in my car. This is obviously not intended to be scientific at all, but I did have plenty of speakers to listen against.
I fired up my mix reference playlist, took one last listen to the Genelecs, and swapped them out for the A200mk2s. It took a moment to adjust to the new speakers, so I played around with the orientation – vertical seemed to work the best for me in this particular room and placement. Truthfully, on first listen I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing. One particular song I was playing back, and have referenced many times before, had distortion artifacts in the low end I had never heard before. I cycled between the speakers a few times, checking to see if there was a connection issue. I soon realized the distortion I was hearing was also coming through the other speakers as well; it had just never stood out to me when listening through them. The other thing that was very apparent right out the gate is how loud and low these speakers can get. It performs like a much larger speaker, and low end articulation is excellent. On a general scale, I find studio monitors are either designed to be forensically honest or, inversely, have some beefiness that makes them fun to listen to while working. The A200mk2s lean towards brutally honest, yet they do have a cool kick to them, especially in the lows. Not boosted or hyped, more like it’s reproduced so accurately and so cleanly that it just sounds huge – no sub required!
As I mentioned before, the A200mk2s can be connected to the KSC-RC to be a companion to the setup. The remote control acts as a digital monitor controller but also controls the DSP functionality built into the speakers. You get a 6-band EQ, high and low shelving, time delay, and mid/side adjustments (mid/side is only available when connected via AES digital input). The DSP is also lightning-fast (less than 2 ms latency). Because Studio B doesn't have any room correction software running, I tweaked the DSP EQ of the speakers based on what I was hearing in the room to better fit what I was hoping to get out of them. On a second preset, I was able to almost copy the sound of the Barefoot MiniMain12s, which was pretty cool. For the record, these features are not a substitute for room correction software or speaker modeling. It just allows dialing in the speakers to your needs without extra hardware or plug-ins on your master bus. The controller is a bit menu-divey for me, but for the most part it is pretty uncomplicated.
Over the next couple of weeks, I checked mixes I was working on with the A200mk2s throughout the day. In a way, they became my “reality check” reference as well as a low end check. Any clicks, pops, extraneous sibilance, or distortion were more obvious on KSDs. These monitors weren’t creating problems but rather revealing issues I needed to address, which, all in all, is a good thing. They performed equally well against the other speakers in our studio. The A200mk2s sounded quite a bit better than the 1031A nearfields I typically reference against. In many ways, I thought they held up well against the ATCs and the Barefoots. I do think I preferred the midrange of the other speakers. However, we’re comparing speakers that are in a weight class apart, so keep that in mind.
In summary, I think the A200mk2s are excellent – surgically precise, brutally honest, but also fun to listen to. I also really like the size of these speakers. They’ve got enough juice to be a viable near/midfield option in a mixing or mastering room, but not so large that they couldn't be a daily driver in a high end home studio. They also look pretty cool! Though the price point isn’t cheap, if you’re already shopping in this price range I’d say it holds its own against the other options in its class (and higher). I definitely recommend grabbing the KSC-RC controller ($999) as an add-on. The more time I spent listening to the A200mk2s, the more I enjoyed them. I am glad I was talked into trying them, and I will be sad to take them down! ($5700 pair MAP; ksd-audio.com) -Jeremy Wurst