Monitor Audio MA700 Gold Speaker System Review

Monitor Audio of Cambridge, England, is a long-established manufacturer of high-quality speakers, though its products are not as well known in the United States as in Britain. The company is somewhat unusual in that it manufactures all its own drivers, crossovers, and cabinets (and it supplies cabinets to many other English speaker manufacturers).

The MA700 is the smallest model in Monitor Audio’s Gold series of audiophile-quality speaker systems. It is a two-way system with a rugged 6-1/2-inch woofer constructed on a die-cast chassis and operating in a vented enclosure. The woofer cone is formed of a polypropylene copolymer, with a molded-rubber edge surround, and a concave dust cap is said to increase the rigidity of the voice coil. Wound on an aluminum former, the voice coil is cooled by vents in the pole piece.

There is a 6-dB-per-octave crossover at 3,900 Hz to a 1-inch metal-dome tweeter with magnetic-fluid cooling. The dome is formed from aluminum alloy and gold-anodized to increase stiffness and damping. The tweeter’s resonance is said to be around 28,000 Hz, well above the level of audibility.

The Monitor Audio MA700 Gold has a nominal impedance of 8 ohms and a rated sensitivity of 89 dB sound-pressure level (SPL) at 1 meter with a 1-watt input. It is recommended for use with amplifiers rated between 20 and 100 watts per channel. The rated frequency response is 45 to 30,000 Hz within 3-dB limits.

The cabinet is finished in matched-grain wood veneer, in a choice of Santos rosewood, black ash, California oak, or American walnut. Its inside surfaces are also veneered, to balance the stress on the panels and insure against warping with time. It measures 13-3/4 inches high, 8-1/2 inches wide, and 10 inches deep, and each speaker weighs 17-1/2 pounds. The black cloth grille unsnaps to reveal a finished speaker panel with flush-mounted drivers and a gold-colored metal screen protecting the tweeter dome.

The rear panel of the cabinet contains the woofer port and two sets of gold-plated binding posts, normally joined by jumpers. By removing the jumpers, the system can be operated in a bi-wired or bi-amplified mode. The connecting posts accept either single banana plugs or wire ends. Price: $1,200 a pair.

Lab Tests

We installed the Monitor Audio MA700 Gold speakers on 26-inch stands, 3 feet from the wall behind them and about 7 feet apart. The averaged room response from the two speakers was quite uniform from 60 to 20,000 Hz except for a peak between 200 and 300 Hz that was evidently caused by a floor reflection.

The close-miked (quasi-anechoic) frequency response of the woofer was flat within 5 dB from 85 to 1,600 Hz. At higher frequencies the output dropped rapidly, which seemed inconsistent with the uniform room-response measurement and a crossover at the specified 3,900 Hz. (Our impedance measurements also suggested a crossover closer to 2,000 Hz than to almost 4,000 Hz.) After correcting for the relative diameters of port and cone, we combined the frequency response at the port output with the woofer-cone response to create an overall bass frequency-response curve that reached its maximum at 70 to 80 Hz and extended downward to the vicinity of 30 Hz.

At first, splicing this bass response to the room response curve appeared to be straightforward, as there was more than an octave’s overlap between them. But the result—an elevated bass response broadly peaked between 50 and 100 Hz—was not consistent with what we heard from the speakers and was probably open to question below 200 Hz. The output was smooth from 200 to 20,000 Hz, however, varying a mere ±2.5 dB. Although the low frequencies were not as prominent as our measurements suggested, listening tests confirmed that the speaker’s useful bass range extended well below 50 Hz, with a notable lack of audible distortion at reasonable listening levels—completely consistent with the manufacturer’s ratings.

The system’s sensitivity, with a full-range pink-noise input of 2.83 volts, was 86 dB SPL at 1 meter. Impedance reached a minimum of 7 ohms at 200 Hz, with peaks of 20 and 19 ohms at 32 and 95 Hz, respectively, and a maximum of 29 ohms at 2,300 Hz. It averaged well above the rated 8 ohms over most of the audio range. With a constant drive level of 4.5 volts (corresponding to our standard 90-dB SPL reference level), the woofer distortion was between 0.1 and 1 percent from 1.000 Hz down to 90 Hz, increasing to 3 percent at 70 Hz and to 7 to 8 percent between 25 and 30 Hz.

The speaker’s horizontal dispersion was excellent. The on-axis and off-axis response curves remained within 5 or 6 dB of each other up to 8,000 Hz and diverged smoothly above that point, differing by less than 10 dB at 20.000 Hz. Quasi-anechoic FFT measurements showed a prominent tweeter resonance at 26,000 Hz, with an amplitude of about 18 dB.

The MA700 Gold performed impressively in pulse power-handling tests, although the speaker’s relatively high impedance made the amplifier the limiting factor. The speaker absorbed 320 watts at 100 Hz, 450 watts at 1,000 Hz, and 720 watts at 10,000 Hz without damage or audible overload.

Comments

The sound of the Monitor Audio MA700 Gold was completely consistent with our measurements except in the low bass, where it was clearly more accurate than our woofer measurement would suggest. It had a silky-smooth sound that gave no audible hint of its small size. The bass was clean and useful down to well below 50 Hz, and there was practically no upper-bass coloration of voices. Only a slight tendency toward warmth (at least in our listening room) gave away what was probably a modest emphasis of the lower octaves.

In comparing the MA700 Gold with some other speakers of comparable size and frequency-response range, but considerably lower price, the most striking difference we found was in the sense of space generated by the MA700 Gold. The “air” it created was unmistakable, making the other systems sound somewhat pinched and artificial in comparison. Although there are no obvious features of the MA700 Gold that would explain its sound qualities, it seems likely that they were achieved by a number of techniques, including flush-mounting the drivers for minimum diffraction at the front-panel boundaries, as well as good basic design of the drivers themselves.

Whatever the reasons, the listening quality of the speaker was truly excellent. We have heard a number of larger speakers in the same general price range that also deliver this caliber of sound, but the compactness of the M A700 Gold sets it apart from its sonic peers.

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