Monitor speakers come in all shapes and sizes these days, so it comes as no surprise to see Spendor package their SP2/3 monitors in matt black boxes. Roger Brown threw away his wraparound cones, to see if their response was as flat as their cases

I thought minimalist black boxes had disappeared up the style cul de sac that was the 80s, so it came as something of a shock to see these speakers emerge from their packing. An imitation wood grain seemed to compound the aesthetic confusion. Spender's style intentions may be obscure, but their sonic aims certainly aren't in doubt.

Black is not a colour

These are professional quality monitors aimed at top end studios, and their looks belie a performance which is as accurate as it is transparent. That's not to denigrate the SP2/3s. Uncoloured sound is the holy grail of studio monitoring, and these monitors excel at delivering a clear signal, with no excessive coloration, and a flat, even response which doesn't misrepresent the mix.

The sound emanating from these black monoliths is big, but I also thought it was so flat as to be deficient in bass response, when I first fired them up in my small home studio. Moving them to a larger room allowed those bass frequencies a little more space to expand, and revealed a bass signal as clean and tight as the midranges, with the same flat response. If you're familiar with Yamaha's ubiquitous NS 10s there's no surprises here. To me, the sound of the Spendors is best described as NS 10s writ large.

Make the connection

The Spendors come ready for immediate connection via twin terminals on the rear, and utilise 200mm woofers and a 19mm soft dome tweeter to output their sound. Crossover point is at 3kHz in an active frequency response range of 60Hz to 20kHz. This is a classic two way design, with the drive units matched to a tolerance of within 0.5dBu, providing a very smooth frequency response and a bass output with little or no coloration.

Cabinet design is of paramount importance in extracting the maximum bass response without excessive colouring of the sound, and the SP2/3s bass ports certainly look the business, nestling under the clear kevlar woofers. Shiny black plastic tubes with gently rounded ends channel those bass vibrations away from the middle of the cabinet, where they become all too easily muddled up with midrange frequencies. From there, they're pumped out, turbo style, through the ports, compressing them slightly in the process, thus adding presence to the bass sound.

There's no hugeness to the bass sound on the Spendors, simply a clean, flat signal. Lovers of dub or dance might be advised to look elsewhere, but the Spendors certainly fit the bill when it comes to any other style of music, or spoken word recording.

In fact, Spendors are a favourite at the BBC. I can certainly imagine a BBC producer enjoying such a clear, undistorted signal, and huge sound. Even pumped up to the maximum 90 watts output from my amplifier, I could discern no appreciable distortion, despite my pumping basslines causing the woofers to jump around like jelly on a plate.

Verdict

If you're in the market for a top quality pair of monitors and like your mixing clear, clean and undistorted, then check out these black slabs. At over £800 they may seem a trifle on the expensive side, but if it's studio quality monitoring you're after, these will fill the bill very nicely.

Their use is ideally suited to television, broadcast and film work, given their mid range bias. Much rock and pop fits well into the active range of the Spendors too, and if you can find the pennies, these monitors may be your path to monitoring heaven.