The speakers works fine if you are using the Bluetooth or the USB inputs (never tried the optical). They make really good computer speaker or for gaming. Music sounds as good as you could expect it to sound for anywhere near this price. Subwoofer is nice but not necessary.
if you are looking to upgrade their sound, the RCA that I was told by support doesn't go through the internal DAC would seem to be the ticket. . I tried the RCA inputs with 3 different DACs and 3 sets of interconnects. Although you could hear a difference, each one of them distorted the sounds. This was with or without tone controls. It was unlistenable regardless of what I did. At support's suggestion, I returned for another unit twice which had exactly the same problem.
So if you don't want to use the RCA inputs, you are good. As computer speakers they are great, but I had hoped for a little more.

I bought these on a whim and wasn't sure what to expect as there were no review on it. I am happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised. The bass is good for bookshelf speakers but you would probably want to pair a sub with this.

I am comparing these to my Audioengine A5+ which are decent speakers.

Compared to the A5+, these are definitely better but make sure to adjust the bass and treble to your liking to make these shine.

I noticed that there were no reviews on these speakers when I purchased them which made me a bit concerned. I?m happy to report that these speakers sound fantastic and have exceeded my expectations. The imaging and soundstage are fantastic and outperform powered speakers I have owned at twice this price. The highs and midrange are exemplary, providing plenty of detail. The bass is the only limitation here. While the speakers offer adjustable EQ, pushing the bass only serves to muddy the mids. Pair these with a decent sub and you have a killer desktop system!

If possible, I would have given these 4.5 stars due to the minor critiques listed below, but overall ... these are great performing speakers for the money. We ened up paying $399 due to a holiday sale.

Pros:
- Solid build quality featuring speaker cabinets that have fewer parallel walls (helping eliminate cabinet resonance, and improving sonic performance).
- In smaller rooms, you'll likely get away with a +1 or +2 bump in the bass output. Ultimately, these should be paired with a good quality powered subwoofer for a more sonically complete experience. The 605999 10" Studio Subwoofer from Monoprice would be a stellar match with these, turning these into a complete 2.1 sound system that will be difficult to beat for anything under $2K.
- The side-firing, passive radiators act like a well-tuned port and greatly improve the bass perforance of these smaller speakers.
- Having the ability to swap inputs on the back allows you to use these in a left/right, or right/left configuration depending on where your outlet is located in relation to the one powered speaker.
- The EQ adjustment is nice and allows you to adjust the EQ for room interferances. If you want a bump up in the midrance, you simply bump down your bass and treble.

Cons:
- Even in a smaller room, you can get distortion from excess bass gain added via the remote EQ adjustment as the passive radiators start to audibly waffle with anything in the +3 or higher adjustments on bass based on our experience in a ~200 sq. ft. room.
- You are unable to know what your EQ adjustments are, you have to zero out the EQ adjustments then count up or down on the bass and/or treble adjustments to understand where they are set. Since we were testing these in several different rooms:
1) We did not know if the EQ adjustments stayed when the speakers were powered down?
2) With no indicator, we had to start from zero and adjust from there to get these to perform better in various rooms.
- I still need to test if this impacts their performance, but the included speaker wire that goes from the on unit with the amplifier to the passive unit feels/looks cheap and insufficient.

We still need to try:
- Using the built-in headphone amplifier, but I will try to get to that shortly.
- Replacing the power cable with a better AudioQuest one to see if that improves sonic performance.
- Placing these in a large+ room (450+ sq. ft.) to see how they perform.

With that said, these arrived well packed in a double-boxed packaging. The sonic performance of these speakers got much better after about ~10 hours of break-in. My assumption is that this is from an electronic component within the amplifier breaking in, versus a driver break in. I was almost too quick to judge/rate these, and our initial impressions would have been incorrect. These truly sounded smoother, and overall better after about 10+ hours of play time.

We tested these against three other speaker systems including:
- Two Google Max spearker set in into a stereo (dual mono) configuration so their amplifiers are at full power.
- A custom $1500 pair of carved marble Nohr bookshelf speakers (likely too large for the ~200 sq. ft. room).
- A custom pair of full-frequency, single driver custom tuned/ported cabinets using a Fostex driver, powered by a Yamaha MX-S90 amplifier using a laptop with a Emotiva Big Ego+ DAC (another great unit for the price).

Hands down, for the money ... these speakers are a great value.

If these prove to be successful, you should consider designing a larger single unit version of these with a AMT ribbon super tweeter, Class A/B amplifier/each, and a balanced XLR input (or even BT receivers for streaming from a HT processor). This would allow for a pretty awsome home theater configuration that would rival much more expensive, professional systems and still sound geat for music. Whoever the audio engineer/designer of these speaker is should be given a high five. Monolith components are simply a great value for the money and rival some of the higher end components I have seen in the high-end audio industry.