Very clean cable, pleasing warm sound, incredibly smooth compared to what I used to have, quite revealing as well.

Wire gauage is too big for many terminators -- other than that, none!

I recently moved to a new apartment and now suddenly have more room to audition my gear as well as totally different accoustics. My ceilings are about 12-feet high and the walls are brick in the living room. Naturally, I was anxious to hear how my setup sounded in its new home. After powering up, I was slightly unimpressed as everything, of course, sounded totally different here. The music was flat, had hardly any depth to it, and the highs were extremely harsh. I guess that the system's old home, which was very compact and full of clutter, was extremely forgiving to my setup. I was pleased there, but not here. I was, quite honestly, not enjoying using my gear for music any longer.

About two weeks ago I decided, after reading numerous reviews from others here and on Usenet, that my four year old Monster "classic" wires weren't giving me all the perfomance that I wanted. This makes sense as they were fairly inexpensive at the time and, as I was more of an impulse consumer then, the salseman assured me that these were the in-thing with hi-fi. Feh.

Anyway, I visited a couple of local shop to look for new wires. I ended up coming home with some AudioQuest wire (the model, unfortunately, escapes me) and some Monster MCX-2s. After listening to the two, I decided to try the MCX-2s big brother, the M1.2s, as it was more along the same price as the AudioQuests that I had borrowed.

The MCX-2s were good. They did quite a bit. The M1.2s, on the other hand, did even better! I am not here to talk bad about AudioQuest, their wire performed excellent but in the end, I liked the M1.2s a hair better.

The M1.2s added new depth to music. Vocals are smooth now, not harsh. I can hear each instrument and other details that were not apparent before. This cable is much warmer than the "classic" Monsters I had before. Midrange is now there, where it wasn't before. I'm enjoying listening to my CDs again, and 5.1 performance is incredible!

One last comment: This cable did need about a weeks worth of break-in before it really started to shine. After hooking it up the first time, it was a little harsh -- harsher than the MCX-2s (the ones I borrowed were used in some equipment on the floor and were thus broken in, as were the AudioQuests). After about a week, they've really started to perform extremely well.

If you buy this cable and your dealer is nice, you can talk them down to $4/foot instead of $5/foot.

Similar Products Used:

Original Monster wire, semi-fancy boutique AudioQuest cables.