John Harris checks out the Tandy Minimus 7 near-field monitors.

Tandy shops are probably well known to most readers who have to buy the odd stereo jack to phono connector, for the studio. What you probably don't know is that their best selling speaker, the humble Minimus 7, makes a fine addition to any studio, large or small as a near field monitor. The importance of making a comparison between the sound of big loud monitors and something like a portable cassette recorder is apparent in the amount of studios where a cassette radio has been stuck to the top of the desk or hung on the wall. After all, that's what a lot of music is played on, but before you steal your little sister's ghetto blaster lend an ear to this little number.

Construction

The Minimus 7 is about the size of a bookend and could easily fit on a shelf. The die-cast aluminium cabinet with removable grill means that these speakers are no lightweights and so even with a good helping of reggae thundering through them they're not likely to move. Inside each cabinet is a 4" high compliance woofer, and a 1" dome tweeter resulting in a frequency response of 50-20,000Hz, and while this isn't going to win any prizes for bass reproduction, that's only to be expected in a cabinet of this size. Power capacity is 40W (20W continuous) which is ample for near-field monitoring of this kind. What's more the no-nonsense, smooth, all-black finish makes these speakers look thoroughly professional and belies the price.

Sound Test

Positioning of speakers is really important for a good stereo image and the best positioning I found was to place the Minimus 7s on a shelf at about ear level, angled slightly inwards. In terms of top end they sounded pretty good in comparison with the H&SR studio Tannoy SRM12s and reproduced sounds with a lot of HF such as cymbals and hi-hats faithfully. This was encouraging so I tried a bit of bass guitar and bass synth, and while there was an absence of deep bass in the sound, the Minimus 7s performed as well as most medium sized ghetto blasters, and better than most TV speakers I've heard. In the Middle frequency range there was a tendency towards peakiness at around 2kHz when driven hard, but this was not enough to constitute a problem.

One of the best things about these speakers is their clarity when you're setting up stereo effects like chorus, delay or reverb. Previously, I'd had to resort to headphones to achieve a good balance but stereo imaging was made a lot easier with the addition of this small pair of reference monitors. When running a whole mix through the speakers the clarity was again impressive and the only thing to be wary of was a tendency to overcompensate on the bass end due to the frequency response, so it's important to check them against a set of larger monitors if you have any.

"In the Middle frequency range there was a tendency towards peakiness at around 2kHz when driven hard..."

Conclusions

At the end of the day the Minimus 7s are pretty good value for money because their main contenders in the small monitor market are Fostex, Auratones, and the Little Davids, all of which are more expensive. Their nearest rivals, the Fostex 6301s, do have the advantage of being self-powered, but if you already have a larger set of speakers and an amp a Tandy's remote speaker switch won't cost you an arm and a leg.

Also Tandy shops quite frequently run special offers in which these speakers are often involved (I picked mine up for £22.95 each) so it may well be worth waiting.

The Tandy Minimus 7s cost £37.95 each including VAT and come in either silver or black finish.

Further information can be obtained from: Tandy Corporation, (Contact Details).