Following the Applause Award along with a fantastic review from David Price, StereoNET presents Monitor Audio’s flagship statement loudspeaker, Hyphn, with an Innovation Award at their 2024 Product Of The Year Awards.
When speaking of the Hyphn at the Product Of The Year Awards, StereoNET said,
“This British brand has been undergoing something of a renaissance over the past few years, and is now proudly reasserting itself on the world loudspeaker stage with this new, ultra-high end statement design.”
They went on to say,
“The result is a sound like nothing else around – it’s super-fast, ultra neutral, and highly detailed yet possessed of gargantuan power output.”
“A peerless, definitive, uncompromising demonstration of the company’s current design, engineering and manufacturing capabilities, and its future ambitions.” So says Monitor Audio Group’s head honcho, Rob Barford, about his company’s new flagship loudspeaker – and I don’t think you could be clearer than that!
This unconventional looking large floorstander is interesting on many levels. Not only does it bring much original thinking to the problem of creating a truly neutral and transparent monitor, but it’s also totemic of the wide and deep changes that have been happening in the Monitor Audio Group in the past few years. The company is wholly British-owned and independent, so not beholden to parent companies wanting a quick return for their money, Rob told me in his recent interview. And that is why it was possible to spend over three years making the new Hyphn. It was conceived as a celebration of Monitor Audio’s fiftieth anniversary and something to set out the company’s vision – what Global Marketing Director Michael Johnson calls “a North Star product”.
“Hyphn is unlike anything we, or anyone else, has ever created: the most creatively ambitious, technically advanced, and powerful loudspeaker in the history of Monitor Audio Group. It’s a definitive demonstration of the capabilities we’ve developed over our first five decades”, he says. This is effectively the production version of the Concept 50 prototype released in 2022 and retails for £70,000. It puts the company into the ‘ultra high end’ sector, a place it has never been before, where there’s simply no excuse for any failings, and competition is cutthroat. That’s no easy challenge for a speaker brand widely associated with products at one-tenth – or even one hundredth – of the price.