Monitor Audio Owners Thread - Page 52

my speaker set up is now monitor audio 8i front 3i for surrond thinking of getting grlcr or 10i for center, do i need a center will it help? i moslt ylisten to hd tv and a little music and little dvd movies, or should i buy a sub, my parents arent huge fans of window shacking like me. any recomendations as for a cheap sub that will provide good bass but not overpowering.
CHEAP i want to spend my money on the center mostly?
unless someone highly disagrees with me tell me ur reason

DAMN so jealous! Tell us more about em once you go back! What i wanna know is 1) How good the bass is on those suckers, since they seem pretty huge compared to the rest of monitor audios stuff, and 2) how do they compare to other $10,000 speakers. If its still monitor audio then i imagine it wipes the floor with most of them.


Whichever one is easier, because if the tweeters on the floorstanders are at the center of the tv then there is no way you can match the level of the tweeters on all the speakers. Its probably easier to put it above and tilt it though

the tweeters are a little below the center but i have a dvd player on the lower stand is it worth moving the dvd player and putting the speaker ,buts its much easier for me to put it on top?

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Hi, I am happy to see a Monitor Audio thread. I am a newbie to the forums and you must start somewhere. This is probably a pretty typical set up and it sounds truly incredible. Sacd, DVD-a, Movies, et al.

R180s left,right,center. R90s rear. R360 sub.

In my video game room, I have the R90's all around, with a 180 for the center and the 720 sub, and I love it! Even though I have a much more expensive main system, the Radius game room is also a great place to get away and listen to some music and not bother my wife while she is watching TV.

Welcome to the MA family kjoy69!

does anyone have any suggestions for buying used? anything i should askthe seller?

any one know where i can get the grlcr in california or the silver 10i or 12i

I recently took ownership of a pair of GS LCR's to take for a test run. The local dealer doesn't stock the GS line, but I really liked what I heard from the RS line, so I special ordered these to see if I would want to make the switch from my Paradigm Sigs (V1). The plan was that if I liked them enough, I would keep one of the LCR's for the center, sell off the other and get the GS60's and FX's to complete the package.

I stayed up until 3am last night running the GS's through their paces with an assortment of music, and the short of it is that they are very nice speakers indeed. Better in some areas than the Sigs, different in others, but not worse in any. The treble is just as I expected it to be based on reviews - detailed and delicate, a little elevated, but very smooth. The difference between the Sigs and MA's in the treble is slight, but I would give the nod to the MA's. The midrange of the GS's is cleaner, more transparent and smoother than the Sigs, but the Sigs give a little more body to vocals. The MA's don't sound overly lean, but in comparison to the Sigs they sound a little lighter on their feet. The bass on the MA's sounds well balanced, tight and articulate. The Sigs sound a little warmer and rounder. Neither is really better than the other here, just different.

A little more about the midrange . . . . while it was initially the detail and clarity that got me interested in the MA's, part of the reason I was considering new speakers was because recently I was finding that there was something bothersome about the midrange on the Sigs. I can't put my finger on it, but I just found the sound of voices to be annoying at higher volumes. They sounded kind of "shouty" and maybe a little "sour" for a lack of better words. Once I latched onto that annoyance I could hear it even at lower volumes. Now keep in mind that this quality is subtle and you may not even notice in a short listen to the Sigs, but even my wife said that she found the sound of the Sigs to be somewhat irritating at moderately loud volumes. I had always sensed a bit of forwardness in the mids of the Sigs, but this annoyance seems like it is something other than just a tilted up midrange.

I should also mention that while my wife doesn't have the same passion for audio that I do, and she doesn't have the audiophile vocabulary to describe what she hears, she does have a good ear and I respect her opinion. She really impresses me sometimes with her ability to pick out the differences in the equipment I have purchased over the years. In this case, within just a couple of hours of playing the MA GS speakers she said she liked them more than the Sigs and that they sounded more natural and easier to listen to at higher volumes. She would be the first to say if they were too bright as some have said about MA.

I still want to check out the new Paradigm Sigs with their Beryllium tweeter and new aluminum midrange drivers, but if those don't work out the MA's are definitely replacing my current speakers.

I have to admit that it feels a bit weird to go from speakers that cost 30% more than these, but that is easy to let go of when I listen to them.

Oh, and the tech geek in me is just fascinated by the cool technology of the drivers in the MA's. The midrange drivers are very slick looking with their satin ceramic finish and golf-ball dimples. Even though the tweeters are gold anodized, they have a very unique sort of bronzish tone to them that gives them a distinct appearance. I like the curved cabinets of the Sigs a bit better, but the MA's fit and finish are top-notch and because of the attention given to the driver design, they look really good "undressed". Hey, I told you I was geek for sexy tech. And the black lacquer finish on the MA's is impeccable - smooth as glass with virtually no ripples or orange peeling.

I'll report back more as I live with the speakers a bit longer.

Cheers!

Good stuff. Thanks for the report Hifi.

does anyone know wat speaker wire is the best for monitor audio speakers i have a 8 year old wire connected to the rear and a 5 year old wire connected to the front, so when i install the center i would like to get the most out of my speaker, so wat wire,
also i have the str da1es sony reciever is that good?

Here's a nice post about cables from hifisponge that I completely agree with.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post11629404

Thought this group would be interested in the review that was just published on the bookshelf model in Stereophile. The review has been available in print for a while, but now it is on their website.

http://stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/907mon/

The reviewer's assessment pretty much mirrors my experience with GSLCR's so far, however he reports some "gruffness" in the bass at high levels that I think is unique to the small GS10 model he used. It is afterall a single 6.5" driver being played full-range, so it doesn't surprise me that the speaker lost some composure when asked to playback low bass at high levels. Cross the speaker over to a sub, and I'm sure that problem would go away.

people several times have mentioned the room has a lot to how the speaker sounds like.
my tv room is the same as my family room and it has a window , high slanted sieling one of the sides are open to another room and one side is closed its tile with a carpet on it, any recommendations on wat i could do to the room. i do not want to spend that much since i am spending my money on a center. (rslcr)

HFS ... I'm curious ...
what gear are you using to drive the MA's,
and what source component(s)?
And most of all, which source material?

I ask, because I auditioned MA GS's with Marantz
top of the line AV gear, versus Arcam top of the line
AV gear -- and no contest, not even close. Arcam just
blew the similarly priced Marantz stuff right out of the water.
No exaggeration. But this was with a Steely Dan reference CD,
which IMHO, makes or breaks the deal -- the recording.

There are so many darn variables in this business!

any one know how the warranty works with monitor audio , one of my speakers the two bottom woofers are not working.

What should i do.

I'm afraid that we may share different views on the contribution that front-end components make to sound quality. It has been my experience that once you get into the upper-midfi range, there is very little difference in sound quality between amps, pres and players. I have not tried the Arcam, but I am hesitant to because when I did audition other much more expensive seperates, I heard no appreciable difference in sound quality. For what it is worth, I owned both the NAD Master Series seperates and the Anthem Statement D2 and A5 for a couple of months each and neither sounded better at either low or high volumes than my Denon 5800 AVR. Trust me, I am eager spend what it takes to improve the sound of my system, but everything I have tried outside of changing speakers and finding better recordings has resulted in little to no change. The weakest link in my system right now is the room, which is your typical, multipurpose, untreated living room. But this is what I have to work with at the moment until I can get into a new home with a dedicated room for AV.

Some of my favorite reference recordings are:
Fleetwood Mac - The Very Best of
Michael Buble - Self titled
Steely Dan - Two Against Nature (DVD-A)
The Bobo Stenson Trio - Rarum Vol. 8
Goldfrapp - Supernature
Sasha - Involver
Sarah McLachlan - Mirrorball
Billy Idol - Charmed Life
Blue Man Group - The Complex (DVD-A)
Nora Jones - Come Away with Me
The Eagles - Hotel California DVD-A
AC/DC - Back in Black (Dual Disc)

Missing jumper?

AA -

Those Platinum's are absolutely gorgeous speakers. Though I do wish that they didn't make the 300 quite so wide. Even with the 8" drivers, there is a fair amount of room to each side of the drivers that they could have slimmed the cabinet down. But the attention to detail and industrial design doesn't get any better than what I have seen of the Platinums in my opinion.

I have heard the ribbon tweeter on the Dali Helicons and loved it. How does the new MA ribbon compare? You also said they were slightly mid-forward. Do you consider the GS line to be mid-forward? The GS's sound pretty nuetral through the mids to me. The only deviation from nuetral I hear is a slight rise in the upper treble where things like cymbals reside.

Do the grills protect the speakers much or are they just really thin cloth? I have little kids...

As far as the GS's sounding mid-forward, I suppose all things are relative. If you are used to listening to speakers that are somewhat recessed through the midrange, then one that is relatively flat through the mids like the GS will now sound forward. In regards to the "sound of the metal cone", the material of the cone is only audible if there are resonances in it's usuable range. From what I have seen in the measurments of the GS series, the metal midrange drivers are resonance free through their usuable range and the natural resonances of the cone at the top of it's range are well supressed by the crossover.

Here is a graph of the frequency reponse of each of the drivers in the GS10 reviewed by Stereophile:



First you will see that the response is +/- 1.5dB from 100Hz through 1KHz (the midrange) so the tonal balance is technically flat through the mids. You can see the two resonance peaks of the mid-driver at around 5KHz and 8KHz at the -20dB level on the graph. Again, these peaks are well outside of the midrange and low enough in level that they should not be audible. Still there is room for improvement here, as there shouldn't be resonance peaks in the driver at all.

But compare the performance of the GS metal cone to that of this speaker which also uses a metal driver:



Notice how it starts to "ring" at around 7KHz (the large peak at 7KHz followed by a series of smaller peaks). These too are supressed by the crossover, but technically the GS driver is better damped.

Oh, and one small correction. The center of the C-CAM sandwich in the Platinums is Nomex, not Kevlar, though the two are closely related.

Thanks for your report on the Platinums. Keep them coming as you get more time to listen to them.

hifi,

My Platinums were shipped to the warehouse in Kent, Wa., instead of downhere, go get them for me.


AA,

Thanks for the report. Now I won't spend much time dragging speakers from room to room for comparison.

Damn! I would love to, but then they would make my GS's seem old and busted. Where do you live?

Very nice AA. I am having non-buyers remorse

aa,

its a shame i missed them! they look so purrrty. way out of my range, but i can dream.

those are some bad-ass speakers!

It's a trip how they integrated the terminations into the (separate?) mounting base, makes for even cleaner routing of cables.