Monsoon MM-1000 Flat Panel Speakers

Sound Quality

This is the most important area to consider when choosing a speaker set, whether for the computer or a home theater. Once again, the most important thing to keep in my mind when buying an audio equipment is that your ears are always the best judge because everyone has different musical tastes. It is also necessary to keep in my mind what you plan to use the speakers for. Just about anything will get you by if you just want Windows beeps and dings, but if you plan to listen to music 6 hours a day, you are going to need much more. With that in mind, not many people buy three piece speaker sets for beeps and dings, so the focus here will be on music and (to a lesser extent) gaming.

In AnandTech's first flat panel speaker review, we noted that "You never know what to expect with such a new technology as we have in Benwin's BW2000 speaker set," and the same thoughts were in our minds as we setup the Monsoon MM-1000's for the first time. While the Benwin's provide a very space filling sound where it's hard to tell the speaker's location, the Monsoon's goal is the exact opposite. As mentioned above, Planar Focus technology is designed to direct the sound at the listener and that it does very well as the MM-1000's are very directional. Turning the speaker to its side it feels like half the sound (mids and highs) just disappears. Again, this was done in order to minimize reflections and eliminate crosstalk that will hopefully increase the effectiveness of sound cards that project 3D sound from just two speakers.

And the best part is it really works!

Aureal's A3D positional audio never sounded better from a single pair of speakers and it was much easier to tell which direction a sound was supposed to be coming from. The effect still was not as convincing as four speakers or headphones, but it was much better than any other speaker pair this reviewer has tried.

Overall sound quality for music was excellent with crisp highs and full mids coming from the satellites - just make sure they're pointed at your ears, which isn't always the easiest thing with the nonadjustable stands. Once the bass boost was enabled and the bass knob cranked all the way up, this little 5.25" sub could thump, keeping up with the best computer speaker systems in the same price range and many costing much more. Cranking the volume produced distortion free music at fairly high volume levels until the knob was 3/4 of the way up - beyond that, some distortion began to creep in. The volume output is quite high for multimedia speakers thanks to an excellent 102 dB efficiency rating.

The 200 Hz crossover to the sub does allow some of the mid range to slip into the sub, but the steep third order slope insures that this is only minimal. The same goes for the satellites who are prevented from trying to go too low quite effectively. Overall, this results in an extremely smooth frequency transition from the sub to the satellites.