I am currently looking for studio monitors for my home studio. It’s a rather small setup, so I decided early on that my budget will not exceed 700€. Also, my home studio is in the family living room, meaning I can really use the speakers only during the day, when I have the apartment for myself.
Since I’m sitting fairly close to a wall big monitors are not viable, they take away too much space and I sit too close.
I did a lot of critical listening, checked out Adam A3x, A5x, Genelec 6010, 8020, KRKs and Focal CMS 40s. I loved what I heard in Genelec 8030s and Adam S1X, but both were too expensive and too big. In Vienna, where I live, not a single store had the Monkey Bananas on display, so I decided to order them on Thomann, since they offer a 30 day free return.
The speakers arrived, and at first I was shocked! They were so red! They were a lot bigger than I had thought. I set them up and straight away was astonished how deep down they go. You can really hear the lowest octave here, but not in a boomy, hyped way, really natural. Maybe even a little bit too much bass, but then I had them very close to a wall, so I’m sure they sound differently when standing freely.
I liked what I heard, very quick and precise, very open and the stereo image works well, but something was lacking. The bass was impressive, still, something felt missing. I listened to music a lot and worked on the speakers for 2-3 days, what I did translated well, but something felt out of place. Then it came to me: Soul! The speakers lacked, what Jack Joseph Puig once called “Soul” in an interview. The way presence was represented, the 2-4 kHz octave was somewhat defensive, lackluster. The speakers sounded huge, but they were very analytical, not so much fun to work on. Something like Sennheiser HD 650 as speakers, good, but no fun. Correct.
So I tried the digital input, disaster. That didn’t work at all. At first I thought I had something not setup correctly, some EQ maybe. But no, everything was flat. The sound was tinny, really small, very little bass, I wondered what happened here. This didn’t work at all.
So I finally sent them back to Thomann, and toyed with Focal CMS 40s, but they sounded mushy in the 250 Hz region, a region that I really love, and that makes mixes very tiny and puny when excessively trimmed. I’m going for Genelecs 6010s now. The size is perfect and I found those to be the only speakers that do not try to sound bigger than they are. Something that was extremely disturbing in the KRKs and to some extent in the A3Xs. I just want small speakers, I can check bass on my headphones, and have frequent access to PA systems if I want to really know.
Still, kudos to Monkey Banana for the audacious design and color choices and making an extremely good, fast and tight speaker. If you want a hi-def, great sounding pair of monitors and don’t want to spend 2k€ than go for those.