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Depending on your background in music, you may well find the most musical speakers you have ever heard in the Monsoon MM-700. They are easily some of the most clear, most detailed, most truthful, and most uncolored speakers of the $100-200 price range.

To qualify that statement, let's make a run down of some of what we heard.

In classical music, the most striking quality is the stereo separation of the speakers, lending a very crisp, very tight sound stage and good instrument positioning. Monsoon attributes this to the directionality of the Planar Focus technology, which essentially ensures that sounds do not travel to the sides of the speakers to bounce off adjacent walls, objects, and floors to create interference. Instead, sounds are only emitted to the front and rear of the panels, which means that the sound waves that arrive at the listener's ear are directly from the speaker, and are less likely to contain the confusion of reflective sounds that conventional cone speakers tend to allow. Instrument reproduction was light and crisp, but not so much that it would fatigue the ears. We can't say that the reproduction was overly lifelike or airy, but it matched well with the sound stage and was energetic and vibrant. We have heard better, and we have heard worse, but overall the speakers held their own and came out on top of many other sets we've tested before.

Vocals sounded full and rich - a solid achievement considering the high, 200Hz crossover frequency of the satellites (the subwoofer did an excellent job of supplementing the mid and lower bass ranges of the vocals). Female vocals sounded particularly clear and lifelike, and we were pleasantly surprised at the localisation of the singers and the general quality of the reproduction. Male vocals had minimal but noticeable coloration, which is as good as we've ever seen on multimedia speakers. In pieces with vocals and instrumentation, we were quite pleased to find everything swept together nicely, and yet kept a distinct character, so that each instrument could be clearly differentiated from the next, and from the vocalist. This was further enhanced thanks to the low level of background noise - making possible a delicately low volume for gentle background music.

In more contemporary music, such as Rap, R&B, Pop, and Alternative pieces, the speakers continued to perform well above par. The subwoofer turned out to be excellent in Rap and R&B, emitting strong, clean notes with just the barest of that booming quality associated with down firing subwoofers. On upbeat tracks the subwoofer kept up a tempo of notes that were tight, powerful, and punchy. It couldn't handle the rumbles of the lower bass notes, but then neither can most (if not all) woofers of this class. We even had the nagging feeling that the MM700's subwoofer outperformed the MM1000 subwoofer, but we weren't totally sure and Monsoon was adamant that the MM1000 had bigger, better and badder bass.