Monoprice Expands Monolith THX Speaker Product Line With Towers of Power

Monoprice is seemingly not content to rest on their laurels with their existing Monolith THX products. Having made THX-certified subwoofers and loudspeakers that have earned nothing but rave reviews (by Audioholics as well as other publications), they could simply just focus on promoting their existing products, and that should be enough to grant them success in the high-fidelity loudspeaker market. However, they have announced new speakers in this area which look to surpass their already considerable efforts. At the 2019 CEDIA show, Monoprice unveiled some THX tower speakers and an absolutely massive subwoofer. These new products are based on the existing Monolith THX designs but take them up to a whole other level of performance.

Monoprice 16CH Processor, THX Towers and Dual 15" Subwoofer @ CEDIA 2019 YouTube Video Overview

The tower speakers resemble the THX Mini-towers that we recently ran an in-depth review on except with two additional woofers and the inclusion of a port in its design. The Mini-towers were a sealed design that left deep bass duties entirely to the subwoofer, but the tower version looks like it could have some serious bass performance, so it may be that they can get by pretty nicely without subs. Four beefy 6.5” bass drivers and a large ported cabinet bode well for the bass capability of Monolith’s new tower speakers with reported bass extension down to 29Hz .

One interesting design tactic that Monoprice has used in the new towers is that the bass drivers sandwich the midrange dome and tweeter in an equal quantity. This helps in a number of ways. First, by having the bass drivers at a roughly equal distance from the tweeter and midrange, the lobing patterns that occur along the vertical axis are much simpler than when multiple bass drivers are all set to one side or the other of the tweeter and midrange. Another reason why this design can be an improvement over standard tower speaker designs is that the woofers can interfere with each other, and this can be used as an advantage in reducing vertical dispersion altogether. If you are standing dead ahead of both woofers, the time-arrival of their sound will hit you simultaneously, and their output will sum perfectly, but if you are standing at an angle that puts them at different distances, the time-arrival between them is different, and this difference causes interference with each other and can cancel output. The result is that less sound is emitted at off-axis angles in the vertical axis, so there will be fewer acoustic reflections from the ceiling and floors. That can be beneficial for these speakers in that floor bounce, where the acoustic reflection off of the floor interferes with the direct sound of the speaker, will be less of an issue. Floor bounce primarily affects the mid and upper bass regions and manifests itself as a rocky and uneven frequency response.

The driver arrangement (which can be thought of as a semi-MTM design for you speaker nerds out there) makes the tweeter/midrange driver become the acoustic center of the speaker in a more meaningful way than traditional speakers that place the tweeter above the bass drivers. This further helps the speaker in pushing the Atmos speaker higher above the intended listening axis. Atmos speakers that use ceiling reflections such as this one sound best when only the reflected sound is heard rather than direct sound from the Atmos speaker. By shifting the Atmos speaker up higher in altitude, less direct sound will reach the listener (as long as the listener is not seated abnormally high). The towers can be had with and without an additional Atmos speaker mounted at the top. The Atmos version has a $150 surcharge and may be worth the extra cost for those users who want Atmos but do not want to install ceiling speakers. We really like that Monoprice offers a version without the Atmos driver in this tower and wish they'd do the same with the mini-towers too.

Initial Impressions

Pricing for the Monolith towers is set at $850 each for the non-Atmos version and $1000 each for the Atmos-enabled version. They look to be very competitive at this price point and would have fit in very well with the recent round-up of 5 Killer Tower Speakers Under $2k/pair that we ran in this price range.  Given how well Monoprice designed the Mini-tower and Center Speaker, we expect these to be very high performers indeed. We will try to catch a demo of these at the CEDIA 2019 show this week to give some listening impressions. Otherwise, expect us to do a full detailed review next year. One thing is certain, Monoprice is serious about high-end audio and they are coming out swinging with some heavy hitting products.

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.