The latest gush this flow has brought forth is the Monolith by Monoprice Encore T6 speaker system seen here. This suite consisting of towers, center, and two-way surrounds checks in at just over $1,400—hundreds, or even thousands, less than many established, well-regarded speakermakers charge for arrays of similar size and type. How do they do it? I don’t know that, exactly, either, but presume the answer lies in bare-bones cosmetics, factory design efficiencies, and the scaled economies of direct-to-consumer sales and hyper-efficient overseas manufacturing. And, as Crazy Eddie said long, long ago, “Volume! Volume! Volume!”
Since each member of this Encore quintet deserves a closer examination, I’m going to work backwards, beginning with the B6, a medium-size two-way bookshelf design relegated in this setup to surround-channel chores. The B6 is visually dominated by the huge waveguide surrounding its one-inch dome tweeter. What is a waveguide? In this instance, it’s effectively a horn that controls and shapes the tweeter’s uppermids-to-high-frequency output to better match that of the woofer at the upper end of its operating range. Done right, this makes a speaker’s directivity—its spread of sound over all frequencies of interest in all directions— considerably more even, which translates to “better” (more accurate, or uncolored) sound in real-world rooms. And the “why” here is that reflected sound, which anywhere other than outdoors or in an anechoic chamber inevitably makes up a good proportion of what reaches our ears, will have the same tonal balance as the direct sound coming from the speaker.
This story is from the February - March 2022 edition of Sound & Vision.
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This story is from the February - March 2022 edition of Sound & Vision.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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