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The Monsoon line of speakers have been the most highly praised of Flat Panel speakers in the multimedia industry. Manufactured for the Monsoon brand by Sonigistix (based out of Canada), these high tech wonders combine aggressive looks with great performance. Contenders include a smattering of other companies using NXT based flat panel technology, but currently none of those are up to the quality that the Monsoon Planar Focus technology represents - nor do any of them cost nearly as much.

When the first flat speakers bearing the Monsoon brand name were released in 1998, they cost well over $200US (~249US MSRP). The speakers, dubbed the MM-1000, were quickly criticized for being overly expensive, in spite of the fact that Flat Panel speakers in real world and professional audio/video markets originally cost in the thousands (which made the MM-1000s cheap by comparison). Cost aside, the MM-1000s definitely sounded sweet to the ears of this reviewer (and to many others), and so Monsoon earned itself recognition amongst those who cherished audio quality above all else.

In the course that followed, Monsoon introduced the MM-700s, a lower cost edition of the MM-1000s, and after, the MH-500, a Flat Panel/Cone hybrid speaker set that aimed towards the sub $100 market. In this round, we take a look at the elegant MM-700s, which feature some slight changes (we even term them enhancements) over the more expensive MM-1000, and which also comes in at a rather reasonable $149 MSRP (reduced from it's original price of $179) with street prices as low as $99.