Being a dedicated work space, the Music Room suffers none of the domestic or aesthetic limitations or considerations that intrude on system performance in the real world. That allows a rule of thirds set-up, that places the speaker baffles a little over three meters from the back wall. It also presupposes initial positioning to a large extent, narrowing the window of variation significantly – one reason why the speakers sounded so comfortable straight out of the box. It makes reaching a sensible starting point for fine adjustment significantly quicker and easier than it often is. Stirling established lateral spacing off of the room’s centre-line and fore-and-aft positioning for the left-hand speaker reasonably quickly, at which point, the real work begins – starting with the removal of the nylon glides.
Best foot forward…
Height off of the ground is a critical factor in speaker set-up. The wider the system bandwidth and the nearer a/the bass unit is to the floor, the more critical this parameter becomes. Listening to the Monarque during set-up, its overall spatial coherence, integration and linearity were immediately obvious. But it was proving difficult to extend that linearity and transparency into the lower (lowest frequencies). The solution lies with the feet that Göbel fit to their speakers…
The Monarque use the same, modular stainless-steel foot design that is fitted to the other Göbel speakers, just sized to match. The speakers are supported on threaded posts that are each separated from the four, large diameter disc ‘feet’ by three ceramic balls. It’s a fairly standard arrangement but in this instance and, reflecting the weight of the speaker, the threads are fine pitch and 35mm in diameter. That makes them hard to turn by hand, certainly without un-weighting them. The threaded post offers substantial, horizontal 5mm pry-bar holes to aid precise adjustment, although I’d like to see a dedicated, matching tool for adjustment too. More importantly, the accessories kit for the speaker includes threaded posts in three different sizes, with 12mm, 32mm and 50mm up-stands respectively. The speaker arrives with the lowest, 12mm feet installed – presumably to reduce the overall size of the flight-case, if nothing else.
Those feet are the first thing you see when you remove the bottom of the crate and before you stand the speaker upright. As the demonstrator pair, the review samples didn’t include the extra, taller threaded posts, which are still catching up with production. That means that the Monarques were initially placed on the lowest, 12mm feet. It soon became apparent that we were going to run out of vertical adjustment: we wanted the speaker much higher off of the floor. A quick experiment using spare flooring to chock the speaker up by an additional 15mm made the point pretty emphatically. An equally quick phone call to Göbel produced a set of the taller, 32mm posts, delivered the next day. These immediately produced the desired effect, with a significant increase in low-frequency linearity, attack and transparency, allowing fine-tuning to continue.
