Home > Consumer Reviews > Monsoon MH-500 Flat Panel 3-Piece Computer Speakers

The Monsoon MH-500 speakers are a pretty good product. Listening to music with good stereo separation is great, though the manual it comes with implies that waves generated by the flat-panel elements are easily blocked. If you've got the space to set them out OK, they seem fine to me. The subwoofer is best placed on a hard floor.

This model is actually the bottom of the Monsoon flat panel range; the two satellites each have a flat panel element (for the high frequency range) and a smallish cone speaker (for medium frequencies). The subwoofer has plenty of power for a small office with a concrete floor, but may be a bit quiet in a big carpeted room. Oddly, the next model up in the Monsoon range has no mid-frequency cone elements, which to me makes the MH-500 a better buy, especially for the price (less than US$100).

There's no doubt that the MH-500s have received great praise... . However after experiencing them for myself, I'm now left with a large "Huh?" hanging over my head---a large "Huh?" which, unlike the MH-500s, fills the room with a clear, unmuffled sound.

The subwoofer's output is, at all settings of the level control, muddy and "boomy". Clearly Songistix is going for more volume level than any sense of audio fidelity---with a system designed for closs-range listening, ie multimedia speakers, this is a fatal flaw. Speakers like these aren't made to shake the whole house. Your desk and immediate surroundings, of course, but at least then you'll hear something more discernable than a rumble reminscent of a dying, bloated whale coming out of your sub.

The satellites, a strange hybrid of a traditional cone speaker for the mid and a flat-panel for the highs, don't fare any better. The crossover point for the mids isn't correct---there's a sizable gap between the upper ranges of the sub and the bottom ranges of the mid. (This probably accounts the system's poor clarity on the lower end.) The upper crossover point into the high is too low. Male vocals often completely disappear, and lower female vocals seem unanturally thin. Acoustic guitars reproduce poorly. The highs themselves are almost nonexistant, overpowered by the muddy lower-end response.

What sweetspot there is is absurdly small. One of the faults of flat panel speakers in general (even audiophile quality which these clearly are not) is the small sweetspot; to maximize what you're given extra is attention required when positioning the speakers and position yourself relative to the speakrs. The MH-500s are ridiculous. Shift your chair a foot in any direction from the spot---including vertically---and the "sound quality" deterioates. I feel like I'm shackled in one spot.

Overall judgement: they might be good for a game of Quake, but anything else is better served by higher quality speakers. Medeski Martin & Wood, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, Bright Eyes, Nick Drake, Phil Pritchett, etc. simply fall apart on these speakers.

I feel dirty for listening to good music on such poor speakers. ... .

I use them on my computer for CDs & MP3s files .. I don't find directionality to be that big an issue .. sound especially good right in front, but also sound fine when away from them. Plenty of clean bass. Sound checked the bass with the CD "Heartland: An Appalachian Anthology" & Edgar Meyer's (standup acoustic) bass just sounds great. Running the woofer at less than half is plenty. Trebles are great .. you can hear the finger board action on the guitars and mandolins.

The separate control for volumen / mute is a good / bad thing .. one more wire to mess with, but is nice to have the controls closer than speaker. The mute feature is good to have also ( didnt figure Id use it, but comes in very handy when you have to answer the phone etc.. )

Speakers are taller than I'd like ( had to raise a book shelf to get them in there ) ..

All in all though, I like this system ..

This is what you call high-quality stereo sound! After hearing the effects from my computer (which it came with), I immediately went out to the office supply store and bought cheaper speakers to hook up to the computer, and hooked up the Monsoons to my DVD player. Superior sound!

I loved the look of these speakers, but they were so bad I had to return them. I brought them home, and the bass made a buzzing noice when turned past 1/4 volume. I am not sure whether my model was broken, or if the design is flawed, because when I put my hand over the air port it stopped the buzzing. So it seemed to me like the air port was poorly designed. But it is possible that I just had broken speakers. I would advise you to check these out in the store before you buy them. Cause without the bass problem they were good speakers, but the bass buzzing was too intolorable....