MONOLITH BY MONOPRICE ENCORE T6 SPEAKER SYSTEM - Monolithic Value

THE STORY of how Monoprice parlayed its success as a humble purveyor of computer peripherals into its current status as a direct-toconsumer A/V gear powerhouse will have to wait for another day, mostly because I don’t know it. But I do know this much: the torrent of ultra-high-value speakers and electronics, desktop audio, and even pro audio designs that have bubbled up from the Monoprice spring over the past few years is all but unprecedented in my decades in the audio/video world.

- Daniel Kumin

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.