[meltemi]

1935 (!): Walter Hummel (18 years old), cofounder of German studio monitor manufacturer Klein+Hummel:
„The reproduction must be so good that it corresponds to the original performance, especially in terms of timbre. That's why we talk about fidelity.“
1969: world's first active nearfield studio monitor Model OY.
Standard monitor supplier for German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF.
Neumann monitors are the successors of Klein+Hummel (model designation KH).
Their philosophy: “Every monitor loudspeaker should fill the room with uniform energy across the entire frequency range, especially in the listening position. In the process, it must interact flexibly with the room, the style of construction, installation and the monitoring environment without any loss of precision.”

1976: design brief for B&W 801: „full professional monitor requirements“
1) Low frequency cut-off (-3dB) = 40Hz
2) Amplitude/frequency response = ± 2 dB, 50Hz to 20 kHz
3) Acoustic power output capability in passband = 1 W (112 dBSPL @ 1 m, 106 dBSPL in up to 200 m³ environment)
4) Amplitude/frequency response to remain linear for listening positions ± 30º off-axis on horzontal plane and ± 5º off-axis on vertical plane.
The B&W 801 became the standard monitor for classical music recording studios from the early 1980s well into the 1990's.

In 2019 I attended an event called 'monitor days', where about a dozen „professional studio monitors“ (the brackets are intentional) were presented by their distributors / representatives / developers. The sonic characteristics were ways more diverse than I expected. Being familiar with B&W 800 D3, I could have lived with maybe one or two of these „professional studio monitors“, but IMHO the rest was by far not good enough to be named (or used as) 'professional studio monitors'.

Martin