New Bronze Age

BRITAIN-BASED Monitor Audio offers a wide range of loudspeakers at prices spanning from the bargain basement up to the penthouse that are cleverly named for a variety of metals: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze.

- Thomas J. Norton

The company must have run out of suitable metallic names when its Monitor series was introduced a few years ago— Steel or Aluminum (or Aluminium!) clearly wouldn’t do. But while that budget-priced series represents the entry point to Monitor Audio’s offerings, our saga here covers the next step up Bronze 6G, the sixth generation of the Bronze line.

All drivers in the Bronze series use the company’s C-CAM cone and dome material (ceramic-coated aluminum magnesium), said to minimize resonances. The cones of the bass-midrange drivers are also dished with no dust caps, further reducing possible colorations. All tweeters (apart from those in the company’s AMS Dolby Atmos speakers) employ waveguides covered with an acoustically transparent, hexagonal dispersion pattern grille, and the woofers in the 200 Tower and C150 center speaker are secured via threaded rods that extend through the back of the cabinet.

The 200 tower features dual rear ports (foam “bungs” are provided to block the ports if desired, though I didn’t use them) and employs two 5.5-inch woofer-midranges in a 2.5-way design. Both woofers operate in the bass region, but the bottom woofer is low-pass-filtered above 700Hz while the top one extends through the midrange until it’s crossed over to the tweeter at 2.4kHz.

The Bronze C150 center is a sealed, 2-way, horizontally configured design. Similar to the 200s, it offers dual binding posts for bi-amping or bi-wiring. (I used single wiring throughout.)