Cant decide what monitors i should get for my homestudio once i move to a new place.

1. The room is basically gonna be used only for my pc/music stuff (and clothing storage for the mrs. lol), so im gonna be able to *lightly* treat the room, nothing spectacular tho.

2. Gonna be farily small room around 20-25qm

3. Im no pro by any means, just doing it for the love of being creative.

4. Most of the music i make, i would put it somewhere between rominimal and microhouse(?) stuff like silat beksi, kirik, traumer..

Now, im not sure how i should approach this, cos im pretty sure we all heard (or at least the german speaking) the term "whoever buys cheap, buys twice"

Can you guys recommend me the adams tv7 and call it a day, or should i go bigdick slap on table and get neumann kh120 ?

my friend has the neumann's and i gotta say, they are absolutely insane. i would aim for the kh120 + kh750 combo if i find a good secondhand offer. which would net me on roundabout 3.5k bestcase.

now, a pair of adamsTV7 + sub would be 10-15% of that sadly i cant test adams anywhere here.

Main reason for my big intereset in neumann is, that apparently you hear tons of details with those without having to be "loud", since im still in an apartment after all

maybe someone on here has/had both of them and could give some insight? or maybe something completly different?

or maybe even start with adams and add the neumanns later on?

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2026 at 7:24 PM

This.

 

Neumann speakers are more suited to people who make a living from music. Besides, you'd have to professionally optimize your room, which is very expensive, otherwise the expensive speakers won't even sound their best.

Why not buy these Adam T7V? You can always add a subwoofer later if you don't hear the bass.
Buying from Thomann offers two advantages:

ADAM Audio T7V - www.thomann.de/de/adam_t7v.htm
30-day money-back guarantee & 33-year Thomann warranty

 

what do you think about the take that neumanns dont need to be very loud for details? since im still in an apartment after all

 

Neumann lives off its good reputation, but other manufacturers have caught up and now offer almost the same thing for less money.
The problem is that you don't have a professional studio set up by acoustics experts.

I imagine your neighbors are happy when someone sings, right?

You really need to sing in a way that allows your voice to shine. Don't sing too loudly when practicing; this will protect your vocal cords. But when recording, sing normally so that all the emotions and speech intelligibility come across.

 

Lewitt LCT 440 PURE - 269 €
www.thomann.de/de/lewitt_lct_440_pure.htm
www.lewitt-audio.com/de/mikrofone/lct-recording/lct-440-pure
www.recordingmag.com/resources/featured-reviews/lewitt-lct-440-pure/?v=old-site

It's practically the poor man's Neumann.

 

I (still) have an aging pair of Adam F7s (among others). Last time I checked the TV7s they seemed to sound boxy to me.

 

my room is small and barely treated and my neumann's sound amazing
my friend's adams have never sounded very good to me at all

 

Last edited: Jan 17, 2026 at 2:05 AM

I got a pair of KH120's (V1) about five years back and never once regretted the cost. Yes, they supply excellent detail at low listening levels.

 

What about agood pair of headphones? No accoustic treatment needed and no trouble with the neighbors. And maybe a pair of cost effective speakers to check levels. In the beginning it is easy to get levels wrong on phones.

 

Get the best monitors you can afford. You'll hear things that you never thought that exist. Then get some room correction software sonarworks or ik multimedia and and the spend for acoustic treatment.

 

i already have dt990 pro, and will probably keep using them the most, monitors gonna be more for mixing and subbass

that was the rough plan i had in my head. seems like im gonna shoot for the kh120

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2026 at 10:16 PM

The way to go if you are serious about it and want to progress further, is treat your room first the best way possible and then buy speakers. It is pointless spending 3k+ euros (KH120+KH750) for monitors in an untreated room. And i really don't understand your scale from the TV7s to the Neumanns tbh. There are so many in between the 400 and 3k euros range that you skip what actually is what most people have in their studios. Anyway, a treated room with any good -even semi decent- monitor setup will make mixes translate well in the real world and this is what you should be aiming for. I would rather have a treated room with a pair of low-mid priced Kali IN8 v2 (3way for ~800), than the higher end Neumans with their respective sub in an untreated room. Don't forget one of the fundamental rules, the louder the monitoring system is in an incorrect acoustically space, the worse the end result mix will be. It might sound great in the particular room but when played anywhere else, all the inconsistencies of the untreated room will reveal their ugly face making your mixes unable to translate anywhere else.
So it all depends what you are aiming for... If you just drool over any high end speakers nobody can hold you back from buying those puppies. But if your goal is professional sounding mixes then room correction is first, everything else comes after that step.
Cheers

 

The thing is... buying expensive monitors if your room is not treated makes no sense. I know, because I got through it.

Don't buy monitors over $1K if you haven't got absorbers (and possibly diffusers and bass traps). Large absorbers on the wall behind you help already a lot, because they weaken standing waves, which cause most problems. If you have severe standing waves in your room, they distort the frequency characteristics of your monitors a lot. And what's even worse, it is not a static thing, so e.g. if you move your head back and forth about half a meter, you may hear anything from heavy exagerrated bass to the impression of no bass at all. So software like Sonaworks will not help in practice - it can help smooting the freq graph of given monitors on condition your room is somewhat treated in the first place.

Don't go for a bass heavy setup if the room is small. (You wrote 25 qm - is that qubic meters?) If you do so you will essentially place yourself inside the body of an orchestral double bass, hearing mostly resosnances built in your room and not the source.

In the price range of Adam TV7 I can wholeheartedly recommend JBL LSR305. These are fairly flat (so good for hearing details and judging the balance between bands).

EDIT: Essentially taskforce wrote the same, but I only saw his post after I published mine.

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2026 at 11:00 PM

That's true IMHO the JBL 305 are a budget go-to for a long time now. If you like the Neumann sound you will like the 305. It's similar in character.
And another thing : If you like the sound of Neumann, I'm pretty sure you won't like the Adam sound. Adam is a love and hate thing. A lot of people love the fast attack of the tweeter, and a lot of people hate it. I'm a hater. Adam makes me scared of every cymbal or ride or anything with fast attack and high frequencies.

 

Hell no.

Hell yes.

I've owned both the LSR305 and the T7V + T10S (still have the Adam combo at a friend's house). Same room, with some acoustic treatment, the LSR's were a lot clearer in the mids and lacked a bit of highs (which i think they fixed in the mk2 version), while the adams just sound hollow and messy to me.

So that friend i mentioned? He did the same thing with the Adams. Still uses mostly headphones, the sub is really more for show (for clients who are there physically and want to feel it) and getting a general idea of how is the sub region beheaving as a whole, not for precission stuff, because the room is not fully treated and there are some very prominent (athough known) issues on the subs.

So a setup like that makes some sense if you're aware of the problems, but it's not very reliable, not in a room like that anyway.

 

First, power is key, in relation to your room size, when picking a monitor. Monitors underpowered for your room will have to work harder at higher volumes and that will introduce unpleasant harmonic distortion and inaccurate sound. Say your ceiling is 3m tall, 25 x 3 = 75 cubic meters, you need to factor in one watt of nominal power for your room, or a strict minimum of 75W RMS (per monitor). I would double that to be safe.

Second, if you're no pro, just buy the best that you can afford, just as you would pick a car (remember: power matters).

For instance, I'm not a pro driver, so the whole supercar thing is lost on me. Also, my legs don't fit in those coupés (SLK, etc) that my girlfriend drives, so a long time ago, I picked a car brand and model with four doors and a rocket engine that wouldn't break the bank.

My point being, for your parameters, most $500-$1,000 7-8" woofer monitors will do nicely. If you lived in or near a musical city (NY, L.A., ATL, Nashville, Tokyo, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, etc), you could call up some studios and ask them if they're selling some of their unused mid- or nearfields. They will likely have been well maintained and repaired in-house, so you can buy used with confidence.

Last but not least: Adam monitors have a certain sound. That innovative tweeter is exceedingly brittle, or sibilant, or just too bright for some ears. If you can't audition them: play it safe, steer clear. And look at other alternatives, in your budget, for similarly priced and powered monitors.

At your price/requirement point, I would consider JBLs, Mackies, 1K Multimedia, Kali, and of course Genelecs and Dynaudio albeit at the higher range. I would steer clear of the cheaper brands (Behringer, Presonus, KRK, also Yamaha). The pricier tier (KH, Focal, Hedd and even Adam), while they offer budget solutions, shine best only at their upper/flagship level offerings. Like cars.