Monitor Audio

Silver 100 7G Standmount Speakers

£749

Monitor Audio introduced its Silver Series loudspeaker range way back in 1999. Amazingly it's now in its seventh generation, just to make us all feel old! The latest iteration retails for £749 and sits just above the entry-level Silver 50. There are also three larger floorstanders, plus speakers for surround and Dolby Atmos applications, and an optional subwoofer. Something for everyone, then.

The Silver 100 is a compact 2-way bass reflex-loaded speaker intended for stand or shelf mounting. It features Monitor Audio's C-CAM gold dome 25mm tweeter above a C-CAM RST 200mm mid/bass driver, divided up at 2.8kHz using third-order crossover filters. The 375x230x300mm cabinet is internally-braced and finished in a choice of five finishes with real wood veneers. It's unusually wide for a speaker of this height, although this does permit the use of a 200mm mid/bass unit which you'd typically see in larger units, including floorstanders.

This at least partially explains the claim that the Silver 100 7G's bass response can rival that of floorstanding designs. Monitor Audio quotes a frequency response of 35Hz to 35kHz (-6dB), which is impressive for such a compact enclosure. Although at 87.5dB/1W, sensitivity is typical for a speaker of this size. In addition, the company says the speaker can push out a 106dB maximum sound pressure level (SPL), which is loud for a compact standmounter. Finally, nominal impedance is said to be an amplifier-friendly 8 ohms.

That chunky mid/bass driver uses Monitor Audio's rigid surface technology, which the company abbreviates to RST II. It sports a ceramic-coated aluminium cone with a dimple pattern for increased rigidity and reduced breakup. The result is a thin light cone that's very rigid and able to handle high volume levels and high frequencies without distress. It's also attractive to look at too.

The tweeter features a ceramic-coated aluminium dome, finished in a gold colour rather than being made of it! Monitor Audio claim this acts as a rigid piston throughout the entire audio bandwidth, pushing any breakup modes beyond the limits of audibility. A vented surround reduces the build-up of energy which might lead to stress. A compression ring is added between the surround and dome to improve the response above 10kHz. A new Ring Magnet structure allows increased linear excursion. The so-called Uniform Dispersion (UD) Waveguard ensures a smooth, even dispersion at all frequencies and improves time-alignment for linear-phase response.

As is so often with Monitor Audio loudspeakers, the Silver 100 is beautifully finished for the money. Your friends would likely guess this cost you twice as much and wonder why you weren't getting the drinks in with so much cash to spare! It's very pleasingly styled too, looking modern but timeless. Our review pair came in Walnut, and the natural wood veneer looked classy. The cabinet feels solid and appears well-braced internally; there's no apparent unwanted resonance or vibration when playing at high levels.

Round the back, four gold-plated binding posts let you bi-wire or bi-amp if desired. The attractive speaker grilles are held in place via magnets. However, I imagine many users will dispense with them and just use the speakers naked.

I used the excellent Copland CSA70 integrated amplifier to partner with the Silver 100 for this review, which delivers around 70W per channel and was able to push the speakers to reasonably high volume levels (95dB to 100dB) without evident strain. So while this Monitor Audio isn't the world's most efficient speaker, it doesn't seem too challenging to drive.

THE LISTENING

I was very taken with the smooth clarity of the latest Silver 100. The sound is clear and detailed, with excellent transparency and crisp, dynamic attack. Furthermore, it has a neutral and open character, one that's surprisingly natural for a speaker of this price. This is partly a function of its classy tweeter and its sophisticated mid/bass driver. As a result, this speaker sounds more grown-up and refined than its price suggests.

Bass is also excellent given its modest cost and size, with extension being unexpectedly good. Being a ported design, it's pretty free and full low down, rather than tight and lean. In my room, it proved well controlled, but for users who find it boomy, foam bungs are supplied. These fit into the rear-facing port to seal it, which tightens things up. You'll definitely get a fuller bass without the foam plugs, but at the expense of firmness and control in certain rooms. Another way to reduce bass output is to move the enclosures away from walls and corners, of course. While I was impressed by the Silver 100's low end given its size, adding a subwoofer would extend low frequencies a further full octave or more.

The Silver 100 7G offers very good bass for its size, but what's especially impressive is the way it integrates into the midband. Deep, powerful bass lines do not mess-up the latter up. Vocals, for example, stay crisp and focused and don't sound as though they're being modulated by heavy bass-drum or bass-guitar lines. Not many small speakers do this as well as the new Silver 100.

It keeps its cool under pressure then – even when driven hard, the sound still retains its clarity and separation and does not become muddy, congested, or distorted. For example, on pushing P from Gunna's album DS4EVER, I was impressed by how vocals remained clear and free from strain. It almost sounded like a separate driver was handling the bass; it was that good.

Its lovely midband was well signposted by Beethoven's string quartet Op 59/1 with the Quartetto Italiano. The Monitor Audio sounded natural and open, and the cello had a lovely woody resonance; violins came across as bright and airy but without harshness or grain. Tonally, the sound was surprisingly uncoloured with no particular shouty spots.

Love for Sale with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga showed vocal handling to be silky-smooth yet clear and incisive. While there was some grain in the former's voice, this sounded natural rather than electronic – he was ninety-five years old when the recording was made! Lady Gaga's voice was beautifully clean and free from sibilance, too. ABBA's Live at Wembley Arena was a joy, once again delivering smooth clarity. Applause is a good test of speaker colouration and is surprisingly difficult to reproduce accurately. The Silver 100 handled it very well, sounding natural and free from harshness.

Soundstaging is impressive – for such a small speaker, the Silver 100 delivers a surprisingly big sound. My regular speakers are Klipsch Cornwall IV floorstanders, which feature three drive units, including a fifteen-inch bass woofer. In view of this, I was anticipating a period of acclimatisation before evaluating this little Monitor Audio standmounter. But I needn't have worried, as I could listen to it on its own terms without any great sense of loss. The overall sound was smaller in terms of scale, but playing the music louder helped to compensate – and being smaller and narrower, it actually imaged more precisely than the wider Cornwalls, so I got a better sense of stereo-spread.

For example, playing the classic Bill Evans album Conversations with Myself, I was beguiled by the Silver 1007G's imaging. This album features a double-tracked Evans duetting with himself playing two pianos. The separation between the two instruments was truly impressive; the stereo was excellent, even twenty-five feet back from the speakers.

Also, when sitting over to one side (close by the right-hand speaker), I noticed I could still hear the left speaker clearly. The aural impression of two pianos occupying a defined acoustic space was maintained even though I was not sitting dead-centre in the stereo hot seat. Quite how or why this happens is interesting. I reckon it's down to a smooth/even high-frequency dispersion. It's an essential characteristic because it mimics the way things sound in real life; you can sit almost anywhere when listening to live acoustic instruments and still hear everything clearly.

Inevitably, the new Silver 100 doesn't fully recreate the sense of scale and dimensionality you get from a much bigger speaker like the Cornwall IV. For example, on the Beethoven string quartet recording mentioned earlier, the cello sounded more cramped and less voluminous compared with the Cornwall. But let's not forget we're comparing a compact two-way bookshelf speaker with a massive three-way floor-stander that costs nearly ten times as much! That the little Monitor Audio compares at all is impressive, let alone compares as well as it does. It punches well above its weight.

THE VERDICT

All in all, I have come away hugely impressed with Monitor Audio's new Silver 100 and could happily live with a pair. It delivers an easy, clean and refined sound that's largely tonally natural, clear, and very detailed. Bass is surprisingly full and deep, given the small size of the enclosure, and the speaker can play remarkably loudly without sounding muddy or congested. So what's not to like?

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