Loudspeakers

MA’s Gold series combines luxury with fine sound, but the flagship floorstander takes things to the next level

Has hi-fi got better in the past few decades? Take loudspeakers for example; low-cost designs from the seventies were somewhere between dreadful and dire, but improvements in design and manufacturing now make it possible to do so much better. This point is beautifully illustrated by the new Monitor 300. To be frank, the price has you wondering if the company has inadvertently left off a zero. From a distance it looks like a swanky high-end floorstander – indeed, you could say the same from moderately close up.

Driven a new car lately? They’re very good, aren’t they? Even a relatively anonymous, middle priced Eurobox like a Ford Focus is now capable of safe, comfortable long distance travel, and is no slouch around country lanes. It’s economical, nippy and practical, so what’s not to like? Loudspeakers are getting this way too. Having started reviewing them in the mid-nineties, I come across fewer downright bad ones now. Perhaps it’s because we’re a bit further down the road, or up the learning curve, to know how best to design a loudspeaker.

Monopulse 62S £1,195 Monopulse breaks the rules on standmount stereotypes with the help of its proprietary super-tweeter The basis of Monopulse loudspeakers lies in applying audio lessons that were learned working with phased-array radar systems, the prime purpose being to reproduce transient leading edges accurately. The consequent need to time-align the outputs of the three drive units at the listening seat imposes some constraints on the driver layout. These are solved by adopting a floorstanding configuration (which determines the height of the drivers above the floor), by placing the tweeter beneath the bass/mid drive unit, and by mounting a super-tweeter on the top, set back from the front panel under a metal protective hoop. The complexity of this arrangement perhaps goes some way towards explaining the decision to go for a fabric covering over the front and sides of the enclosure.

With a configuration first seen on Neat's Ultimatum XL6, the Ekstra is going into production...

Neat's floorstander builds on recent design philosophy, but fills a slightly different role