Thanks for the input
@jae
And
@raindance I feel your pain. That's my story as well. One was knocked over and broke long after the company had stopped manufacturing them. I did manage to track down a few satellite speakers from the 7 series set but they didn't play well with the larger 9 series electrical. It was a lost cause. Also,
@raindance would you agree with anything I say below? Or have any corrections if my sound descriptions are mislabeled? I'm not an audiophile and trying my best to describe.
Thank you for the speaker recommendation list
@jae. I am a new member here because I'm chasing a sound profile those speakers introduced me to that I haven't been able to hear since.
I'm looking for information so I can reproduce the sound with headphones (within reason). My assumption is that I enjoyed the speakers because they were magnetic planars - but I'm not an audiophile so maybe there are other factors that can create the characteristics I enjoyed. So my process here is to find out more about the speakers to determine why I enjoyed them so much.
To my ears they were sterile and clinical sounding with no warmth. They had a small subwoofer but it didn't add any warmth. I often found myself turning it down anyways. The speakers (to me) were great with transient sound. I loved jazz and classical music on them. For some strange reason I loved how little body and thickness they had. I felt as though I could better differentiate instruments and notes when the emphasis was strong in transient, attack, and note decay. These characteristics are lost a little when there is a lot of body and thickness to sound as these details aren't critical to the overall sound and are likely distracting if they're too loud. Example being a guitar pick on a string, it's not critical and you might not notice it as much if there is a lot of warmth in the note or chord that comes after - but with these monsoons you could here that guitar pick, and the notes all very clearly due to the lack of body.
It's odd I use that example because they were bad at rock music because without warmth guitar distortion sounds very digital and not in a nice way. For another example, hearing subtle things in recordings like in a classical recording hearing a chair lightly squeak as someone shifts, normally if there is a lot of body a sound like a chair squeak may easily go unnoticed or unheard but with the monsoons I would hear those things.
There also seemed to be an amazing sound stage. Some examples, on older jazz recordings that used a single mic you could hear the distance different players were from that mic. You could hear the room sound and how it affected the recording. It was easy to tell how far away drums were, or a horn section. You weren't just hearing the recording, you were hearing the characteristics of the room as well.
Similarly with classical music it was easy to determine instrument placement. You could look at an image of standard instrument layout of an orchestra and pick out what was where. Some sections like the strings were fairly easy being so forward but it was also interesting to hear wind instruments seemingly being right were they should be according to the basic layout of orchestras.
When all combined, I loved the sound. I don't think it was accurate to the true sounds of instruments at all, far from I would think, but I loved hearing music in that way. Does a French horn sound like that in real life, I don't think so, but could you easily tell it was a French horn from the clarity, hell yes.
Am I making sense? Are there others who also enjoy jazz and classical music in this way?
