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.