Monitor Audio Silver S2 Bookshelf speakers
Monitor Audio is the British company with thirty years of experience, which has its own division for the development of cases, and also has the laboratory where speakers are constructed. Monitor Audio also contributed much to the formation of Hi-Fi, starting to experiment with aluminum as the material for diffusers, and later forced to talk about revival of the English school of sound. Unlike the U.S. it has other priorities, but what exactly we will not speak yet - we hope that the new speaker system will demonstrate them.
Silver S2 has the traditional proportions - they are approximately the same in height and depth. The bodies are made of MDF and well muted. The quality of finish doesn't cause any claims seemingly - it is hard even to say what covered the bodies: veneer or vinyl film.
The gilt dome of 25mm tweeter is closed with a wiry mesh. Aluminum stamped diffuser of 17-cm woofer and the central "bullet', being made together with it. Why? It's hard to say. Another fact is much more important - as before, the company produces all the drivers almost manually by its firm-specific technology - C-CAM.
On the back panel there are separate pairs of the terminals with gilt plated jumpers. In top part of the back panel there is a round and quite large bass reflex port, and foam plugs are supplied, with a help of which you can "smother" the effectiveness of this resonant system. Monitor Audio pays more attention not only to cases and speakers - as a rule, everything is also okay with the quality of internal filling. It is not for nothing that their speaker systems earned such love of the most discerning audiophiles.
Playing of the first track from the test disc "Focal/JMLab", which we understand literally by heart, puzzled much. None of the speaker systems have played such sound stage of Musica Antiqua Ensemble yet: the most correct by scales width and depth. The scene is natural, as if seen with eyes. The focus is very accurate, views are easy read, spatial width of the instruments is perfectly balanced. But we can't without knocks. If top and bottom bands, being played by different drivers, were adjusted in phase a bit better, the scene could be admitted to be an ideal, like in the systems which are more expensive in three, four times and are able to "dissolved" completely in the reproduced sound space.
Silver S2 doesn't star by the finesse of playback with inexpensive Black&White cable - the sound is definitely better with Blue Heaven. There are no any dimness, but more details; harmonic series is organized more carefully. In addition we had to insert the foam plugs in order to get smoother bass. Having quite high sensitivity Silver S2 pleases by confident and smooth in the whole range dynamics. High efficiency at bottom frequencies is combined with very high clarity of the sound even without the slightest colorings - these systems can handle any musical genres.
However, we slightly hurried about colorings. Once in a while a gentle, rattling side-tone is heard in some tracks, the source of which is, most likely, the mesh of tweeter. So, we recommend extra discerning audiophiles to put it away (this is foreseen in the construction).
