Monitor Audio Gold 300
About a year after settling into my new house, I decided to buy a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 10 floorstanding loudspeakers, which I had reviewed in 2014 for our sister publication Sound & Vision. I wound up buying three of them, with the intention of cannibalizing the drivers and crossover from one to make my own three-way center-channel speaker. But that project was long delayed, and I never got around to doing anything with the third Silver 10: It now sits in a closet as a spare. (The similar but smaller Silver 8 and its replacement, the new Silver 300, were both reviewed for Stereophile by Kal Rubinson.1)
In any event, the Silver 10s have been my reference for the past three years, despite being superseded by the Silver 500s in Monitor Audio’s most recent Silver line. But there are usually other loudspeakers in for review—an occupational hazard in my line of work—and when that happens, the Silver 10s are set aside.
This time around, the “other loudspeaker” is the Silver 300’s big brother, the new Monitor Audio Gold 300 ($7000/pair). It’s the flagship of Monitor Audio’s Gold line—now the fifth generation of Golds, all models of which have been extensively upgraded. All of the Silver and Gold models were designed in the UK and are manufactured in China.
Design
The Gold 300 is a three-way design employing a pair of 8" woofers, an unusually small, 2.5" midrange, and a 1" folded “ribbon” tweeter that isn’t technically a ribbon: Monitor Audio calls it a “Micro Pleated Diaphragm,” or MPD. It’s a brother to the Air Motion Transformer (or AMT) invented in the early 1970s by Dr. Oscar Heil. Variations on this design, most far smaller than the original, are now widely
