Loudspeakers

Since its introduction in 1995, the speaker has been installed in film and music recording studios the world over, and it may well have been involved in the mixing of some of your favourite movies and songs.

Branding is funny stuff. We expect some gravitas with excellent products – being too flippant about something of high-quality tends to put us Brits right off. There’s been a huge fuss about chavs wearing Burberry and ‘devaluing’ the brand, for instance.

Considering its position as both a hi-fi and home cinema speaker brand, and the sizable catalogue of models that it's typically offered, Monitor Audio has been rather slow to step into the Dolby Atmos arena. Now, however, it's selling an upfiring module for 3D audio lovers, and keeping the price low too.

Monitor Audio isn't a speaker maker catering chiefly to music lovers that does pretty well with home cinema all things considered. Nor is it a company packing multichannel cred that nevertheless makes a decent enough fist of hi-fi. If you can detect the slightest hint of compromise in either direction, MA reckons it hasn't done its job.

I believe Monitor Audio's Mass system is destined to be a good seller. Sub/sat packages in general are more likely to shift units than larger, costlier arrays, and this has 
a lot going for it. First, it's from a respected brand that, over the years, has rarely put a foot wrong. Secondly, it's got a neat style thing going on. Thirdly, the total £800 ticket is just the right side of £1,000 (where some people start to sweat when buying speakers), but comfortably high enough to entice audio snobs who won't entertain the idea of a £400 or £500 setup. That it offers a delightful multichannel performance is the icing on 
the cake.

Monitor Audio’s Radius range has already proved a firm favourite thanks to its living room-friendly looks and spine-tingling sound quality. Yet the British brand isn’t resting on its laurels, recently updating the product stable with a crop of new designs. This 5.1 package brings together some of these new additions, including a reboot of the Radius 90 compact speaker (here on front and surround duties) and the brand-new Radius 200 centre speaker. Providing the low-end grunt is the Radius 390, the pricier of two freshly-minted subwoofers. Monitor Audio has styled every speaker in this system with effortless panache. The gleaming gloss-white finish that adorns our sample is pure disco, but the swanky black version is equally dapper.  Each speaker is a solid, impenetrable box with no joins or seams aside from the grooved HiVe II port on the back, which appears for the first time on the Radius range. This, says Monitor Audio, accelerates the flow of air and reduces turbulence for a more dynamic bass response, having the same effect on airflow as a gun barrel on a bullet.