I always think of online retailer Monoprice.com as a place to buy good and inexpensive audio and video cables, but they’ve been branching out. Recently, they’ve added microphones, an 8-channel mixer with USB IO, a $390 27″ IPS1 WQHD2 resolution monitor (which may be using the same panel as Apple and Dell’s 27″ IPS displays), and an interesting pair of audio monitors to their lineup. These are all the kind of items I use to outfit editing stations, so I’ll be keeping an eye on their new items. But I’m especially curious about those audio monitors.
The similarity leads me to wonder whether Monoprice and M-Audio are buying from the same factory. If so, I wonder if the speaker was originally designed by M-Audio or whether the factory sells the same model to all comers, and each company just changes the look of the enclosure. I’m always curious about manufacturing and the provenance of products, so I’m very interested to know more about how (if I’m right) both companies ended up selling almost the same speaker with a different housing and at very different price points.
That’s because the Monoprice “5-inch Powered Studio Monitor Speakers” look suspiciously similar to M-Audio’s BX5 monitors –the size and specifications are nearly identical3. But Monoprice’s sell for 40-50% less money. Here’s a little comparison:
Were I building an editing station from scratch right now, I’d probably be checking reviews of Monoprice’s mixer, their 27″ IPS monitor, and their audio monitors (once they are all released). These are key components of any editing system, and I’ve definitely spent beyond those prices kitting out my setup of hardware that has roughly equivalent specifications.
- “In Plane Switching, a very nice type of LCD panel.
- 2560×1440
- There is one minor difference I spotted between these models, and that is that the Monoprice monitor includes a “four-position high-frequency bias selector switch”, which is not a feature of the M-Audio BX5-D2. But previous versions of M-Audio’s BX5 did include such switches, so maybe Monoprice’s monitor is more of a match to M-Audio’s older monitor?