Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

I enjoy reading about the Monitor Audio products, that always seem to deliver great sound for their price. It would be great to hear about their unconventional Hyphn speaker!!

While I haven't owned dynamic speakers for some time, I've found that screws/bolts have a tendency to become loose after years of playing.

It seems intuitive as blasting hundreds of watts of musical energy into an 'expanding' box over time would lend to loosening of components. This bolt tuning system seems like an ideal way of maintaining balance over time.

Aside from the application of tuning to taste, I wonder how the '300's would sound after a few years. Would it require slightly tighter adjustments?

Thanks for another review!

having a line of tune-able loudspeakers, the difference being the tensioning "bolts" were placed on the sides of the speakers. It would be interesting to see a speaker with both side and rear tensioning bolts so all four sides could be tensioned/tuned to ones liking.

when it came out.

And used it as a guide for my own amateur experiments.

Thank you for writing it.

herb

I am not sure i trust the effect of those driver mounting bolts, on flimsy boxes i can imagine there is some effect when tighten or losen such bolts, but on these boxes that seems so solidly built i am sceptic of the effects described

Thanks for this review - Monitor Audio is underrated and underappreciated by the audio press. As the owner of Monitor's 6G Silver 500 model, the dual 8" sibling of the Gold 300s, I have two encouragements for would-be buyers:

* Break-in time is recommended in the manual, and for me it was lengthy. YMMV but mine took about three weeks of 24/7 using white or pink noise and real music at low and listening volumes. In fact, don't listen to them during break-in because everything from Madonna to Mozart to Metallica sounds like it was recorded in the exact same space. I wanted to cry. Later I did when I discovered...

* That the midrange sings when the stock footers are replaced by IsoAcoustics Gaia footers. WOW - that made the speakers musical and emotionally involving in my room. I think some of their more recent models now actually come stock with IsoAcoustic footers, but I may be mistaken. What I do know is they are awesome with my speakers in my system/room - highly recommended.

Thank you Monitor Audio for creating a reasonably priced, high performance product that delivers so. much. quality. Thank you thank you!

Modern day news media has trained me to try to separate what is implied by an author, and what is fact. A red flag went up when I read Monitor Audio’s release notes of their new Gold G6 HDT drivers.
“HDT draws on the design of the RDT III cones utilised in Hyphn and the Platinum Series,
which consist of a Nomex honeycomb layer sandwiched between aluminium and carbon fibre skins.
The new HDT cone employs a hexagonal pattern to disrupt symmetries in the
cone breakup,”
They do not specifically say that the new HTD driver has multiple layers, but rather the HDT cone “draws” from the design of the RDT III cones (that happen to have multiple layers). I attempted to do a bit of an investigation. The photos in the MA brochure for the Gold G5 series distinctly shows the multiple layers of the RDT II cone. In the Gold G6 brochure, it appears that the HDT cone is single skinned. I decided that the new HDT cones must not have multiple layers.
This review states that the G6’s HDT cones are multi-layered (similar to the PL200). Are they really?

I must say I find Martin's discussion about the tension rods more than a bit disconcerting. Are we really to believe that buyers have to adjust the factory settings just to get a good sound? What was the manufacturer's take on this? In any case, unless a specific torque setting is provided, Martin's quarter turn dictum is meaningless. We don't how tight or loose he had the tension rods before making that sonically optimising quarter turn that Charlie was able to hear after "just a few bars"! Martin's conception of "taking up the slack" may be different from yours or mine. So there seems to be zero repeatability here. MA need to tighten up their instructions (pun intended) and possibly their QA if the sonic difference really was more than just placebo.