The Monitor 6 and Monitor 8 studio monitors are DAS’s link to its origins more than thirty years ago, when studio and hi-fi products marked the company’s first steps. DAS is a Spanish manufacturer of electroacoustic products such as loudspeakers and speaker cabinets.
History of DAS
DAS is a Spanish manufacturer of electroacoustic products such as loudspeakers and speaker cabinets. Based in Valencia, a region with a very strong musical tradition, perhaps the most important in Spain, where it’s rare to find a town without a municipal band, a private band, or both. This abundance of musicians meant that, during a past edition of the Intermusic trade show, a Guinness world record was set for the largest gathering and concert of wind instruments. So it’s hardly surprising that Spain’s most important sound equipment manufacturer is also located in this same city.
The brand’s story begins in the early 1970s with its founder and current director, Juan Alberola. DAS, an acronym for “Dinamic And Sound,” began by making compression drivers, cone loudspeakers, and crossovers in the founder’s own home. Nine years later the company was established in Spain and began looking abroad, attending the Musikmesse international sound fair in Frankfurt for the first time. In the 1980s the company moved to its current location in an industrial park and began experimenting with new manufacturing processes, just as the live entertainment market grew with the arrival of international music stars and concerts became established as mass spectacles. Sales rose and manufacturing processes were refined, and the first speaker cabinets in high-density engineered plastics appeared, giving the company an important competitive advantage.
Today, sales of its products are split equally between the domestic and export markets, with the recent Aero line array system as the brand’s spearhead, achieving excellent results both inside and outside Spain.
Enclosure
The development of the wooden enclosure shows important distinctive features compared with other models with the same purpose. The most noticeable at first glance is the cabinet itself, built from 15-millimeter high-density MDF and with the sides finished in two pieces of 24-millimeter-thick laminated Iroko wood, a very striking tropical wood whose rigidity provides suitable conditions for acoustic work.
The technical approach to building this enclosure differs from the usual in that the closing pieces of the cabinet (the Iroko pieces) are on the sides rather than on the front and back. The front, back, top, and bottom are a single piece of wood cut to size. This system gives the baffle greater rigidity and therefore a better mounting point for the woofer. It requires a more complex routing process for the front baffle, so it is not common among other manufacturers. Paradoxically, despite this unusual design, the cabinet’s resonant frequency is high and lies close to the vocal band, possibly because of the insufficient thickness of the wood used and the lack of internal bracing, which is especially needed on the Monitor 8, where there is a high level of mechanical transmission to the cabinet, particularly at low frequencies.
The enclosure is a bass reflex design, with the port on the rear panel, which keeps the turbulence caused by the air expelled from the port from affecting the wavefronts generated by the woofer. This rear-ported layout means you have to take care not to place the cabinet too close to a wall or any other object that could obstruct free airflow. On the bottom of the cabinet there are two nuts embedded in the wood for attaching it to wall or ceiling mounts.
The first visual impression is of a very distinctive, understated exterior design. Both the small horn and the woofer trim ring, in black cast metal, give it a promising look. The unusual cabinet construction also adds a very pleasant touch of individuality amid so much sameness in other manufacturers’ designs.
Crossover
Because this monitor is passive, it has to be driven with an amplified signal from an external amplifier, which gives you the option of choosing the most suitable power amp for it. There are many power amps, but as a quick piece of advice, two things can be said: you can never have too much power, and good analog power amps are heavy, and the heavier the better, since that means a large transformer, plenty of output transistors, and therefore a lot of metal heat sink, which also weighs a lot. The quality of the power amp is essential to the final sound of this monitor and any other, and using small power amps with small monitors is a mistake that can only be justified by budget limitations.
For testing these speakers, we used a high-quality power amp with plenty of power, the “4 Briston,” rated at 300 watts per channel at 8 ohms, one of those austere amps that doesn’t even have a volume knob. To make sure there was no signal loss between the amp and the monitors, generously thick cables were used. Back to the crossovers: they are very simple, more typical of a PA cabinet than a studio monitor, made up of two inductors, two capacitors, and an attenuating resistor. The circuit board that carries these components also serves, on the opposite side, as the mount for the external input connectors, which are well made and insulated to prevent, as far as possible, accidental short circuits.
Drivers
The drivers fitted in both monitors are from Vifa and SEAS, for the woofer and tweeter respectively, all of very high quality; here DAS, which hasn’t used its own components, has played it safe, using the same kind of parts found in other high-end monitors.
The high-frequency driver is an aluminum-dome tweeter, 0.75 inch for the “Monitor 6” and 1 inch for the “Monitor 8.” On both, a metal grille sits in front of the dome to protect it from accidental knocks, which are disastrous for this type of material. The voice coil of this motor is bathed in ferrofluid, a material that, without affecting the coil’s normal movement, lets it carry heat away much more easily, preventing coil deformation and therefore distortion.
As for the woofers, the cones are made of polypropylene, a plastic material that delivers a bass with considerable body, though it demands more energy than paper-cone speakers, which distort sooner at high power levels. The woofer sizes are 6.6 and 8 inches for the Monitor 6 and 8 respectively. These woofers are cooled through a hole in the center of the magnet’s center pole piece at the back of the motor, which proved sufficient even with heavily distorted signals and overpowering.
The tweeters are fitted with a Linear Quadratic Spherical (LQS™) waveguide that promotes phase coherence between the tweeter and the woofer. The benefits of this small horn were evident from the very start of the test. This accessory, made of steel and shaped like a small horn, distributes and disperses the tweeter’s sound in both the horizontal and vertical planes, where it contributes to good phase overlap between the two drivers. None of these drivers has a magnetic shielding system, which is a significant handicap for entering studios where they share space with computer monitors, which are very sensitive to magnetic fields.
With Open Ears
The listening session begins with the smaller monitor, the “6.” The first sonic impression is quite pleasant, thanks to the good coherence in the midrange, where the two drivers overlap very naturally, conveying the sensation of a single virtual radiating point located between them. The voice, perhaps the most delicate element for sound reproduction, largely because of the human ear’s great sensitivity in this frequency range, comes across very naturally and makes for fairly relaxed listening. Horizontal coverage, for both the midrange and the highs, is exceptionally good, thanks in large part to the design of the tweeter’s waveguide, which also acts as an acoustic coupler between the two drivers at the frequencies they share.
The high frequencies are reproduced cleanly and precisely by the aluminum tweeter, well above 20 kHz, up to 40 kHz according to the manufacturer’s specs, but it also adds a slight coloration to the sound that is typical of this material, which nevertheless gives brass instruments great presence. Nothing to object to in the midrange, and the bass holds up firmly as far as a 6.5-inch driver can deliver. In the test, at moderate levels it performed quite well, but at high sound pressure levels the cabinet’s behavior changes noticeably and the drivers’ own resonances appear, which the crossover has not kept under control. Distortion rises, and such pleasant qualities as vocal intelligibility and punchy bass diminish quickly as power increases, making it a difficult speaker to listen to.
The Monitor 8 proved harder to listen to, with a narrow power window in which it behaved like its little sister. At low power, the woofer and tweeter perform unevenly, making the overlap between them difficult, which is especially tricky on this model, where the voice is shared between the two drivers in a more balanced way than on the Monitor 6. The problem was solved with a considerable increase in power, which even seemed suitable for listening in a midfield position, just behind the mixing desk, a short distance from it. In this new setup the two drivers balanced out and began working in unison, delivering that coherent sound, though more uneven than its little sister in the upper midrange. The work of an 8-inch driver made itself felt quickly, delivering a fuller sound with more body, especially clear in the low frequencies, which extended much lower.
In the higher sound-pressure tests, the distortion problems caused by the drivers’ uncontrolled resonances showed up on this model too, but more prominently, making it impossible to listen without an unpleasant sensation and listening fatigue. These problems could be solved on both models with a sound processor ahead of the power amp, like those used in PA systems or built into most powered monitors. It would be interesting to see the result of adapting a digital processor and power amp to these monitors, fields in which DAS has been working for some time now for its PA range.
Price List and User Manual
These two speaker models are the only studio monitors in DAS’s catalog, with no change in range or model updates since they were introduced several years ago. They are aimed at recording studios and similar environments, and the manufacturer’s price is set at 283 euros + VAT for the Monitor 6 and 330 euros + VAT for the 8.
It is also worth noting the quality of the information the manufacturer provides in the manual with these monitors, but the information on its website is even better, an example of what a manufacturer’s website should be, especially strong in its library section, which is highly recommended.
A Suitable Environment
The test of these monitors took place at Carlos Arsuaga’s recording studio, where the acoustic conditions have been especially carefully handled, since it is a studio with a thorough acoustic design from the start of its construction, by designer Mariano Talamante of SPA. Values such as reverberation, frequency balance, and diffusion are under control, not to mention a relaxing and welcoming atmosphere. There we listened to, disassembled, and tested both these monitors and the Fostex PM series in great comfort, the two people involved in the test being Jorge Acle, a well-known sound engineer with deep technical knowledge, and myself.
The three monitor models tested here share important similarities in construction, raw materials, and design. Value for money is also a parameter on which all three offer an advantageous proposition, which is why all three appear together in this table. Sound remains the last and definitive assessment, reserved for each person’s listening test, bearing in mind that, along with microphones, monitors are the most subjective elements of the entire audio chain.
