Monitor Audio announced that Hyphn, its statement loudspeaker and one of the most technically ambitious products in the company’s history, is now available in over 200 custom finishes. Hand-painted and hand-built in the UK, each custom Hyphn is made to order, giving owners the freedom to choose a finish that sits perfectly in any interior listening environment. The result of a multiyear effort unveiled as a concept for the company’s 50th anniversary, it is now a reality.
Monitor Audio announced that Hyphn, its statement loudspeaker and one of the most technically ambitious products in the company’s history, is now available in over 200 custom finishes. Hand-painted and hand-built in the UK, each custom Hyphn is made to order, giving owners the freedom to choose a finish that sits perfectly in any interior listening environment. The result of a multiyear effort unveiled as a concept for the company’s 50th anniversary, it is now a reality.
The original Monitor Audio design was undoubtedly one of the most interesting products demonstrated at High End Munich in 2022, where the company introduced it as the Concept 50 — a concept/demo product to celebrate Monitor Audio’s 50th anniversary, also intended to test the market and push the brand’s technical and aesthetic boundaries.
Now available to everyone as a made-to-order product, the Monitor Audio Hyphn is a re-engineered concept to meet real-world manufacturing, reliability, and performance goals. In Monitor Audio’s own words, after the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Concept 50 in Munich, “there was almost no choice… we had to make it,” and the Hyphn project then became the way to turn that concept into a viable product.
A demonstration of Monitor Audio’s design, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities, Hyphn is also described as “the most creatively ambitious and technically advanced speaker the company has ever built.” Its unique cabinet, precision milled from a composite of acrylic, minerals, and natural pigments, delivers a visually seamless surface and a listening environment free of unwanted vibration.
For every Hyphn, that cabinet becomes a canvas. Customers can select from a variety of matte, gloss, and metallic finishes from a color palette that spans over 200 colors. Each custom finish Hyphn cabinet is painted entirely by hand in the UK, then assembled by a small team of technicians at the Monitor Audio Headquarters in Rayleigh, Essex. Customers should allow a three-month lead time from order to delivery.
The Journey
Initially, the company indicated that the Concept 50 was “scheduled to go into production later in 2022.” In practice, the design had to be reworked for manufacturability, reliability, and performance refinement. By mid-2023, the production model is announced as Hyphn, and Monitor Audio describes it as taking the Concept 50’s core ideas and “improving upon it.”
The industrial design language is clearly the same: two mineral/acrylic composite towers linked by a central bridge housing the mid/treble array. Each Hyphn speaker features four powerful 8” bass drivers, positioned facing inwards towards each another. They are secured in place by inch-thick metal rods and through-bolt fixings that run through the width of the cabinet to the rear of each bass driver. But the production Hyphn incorporates significant engineering updates, starting with the dual-pillar design where the cabinet construction, bracing, and porting had to be refined for production, also to better accommodate the force-cancelling opposing bass layout and reduce interactions between the split HF/MF/LF sections.
The original six-mid-around-one-tweeter arrangement is now the M-Array in Hyphn: six 50mm mid drivers with a Micro Pleated Diaphragm tweeter in its own waveguide. Monitor Audio argues this avoids the intermodulation distortion issues they associate with traditional coaxial designs where the mid cone forms the tweeter waveguide. The crossovers were also completely revised compared to the Concept 50 prototype, now using ClarityCap capacitors and encapsulated inductors, optimized PCB grounding, and signal routing.
The main cabinet challenge was turning a visually radical mineral-and-acrylic stone structure into a production enclosure that stayed rigid, inert, and free of parasitic resonances while still being machinable and repeatable at high precision. Monitor Audio says the material had to be researched extensively, then thermoformed or formed and precision milled so the final parts could hold tolerances, accept complex geometry, and still behave like a “perfect platform” for the drive units.
The company also had to solve hidden cable routing for the bass sections, integrate formed strengthening ribs and bracing, and keep the cabinet walls thick enough around the force-cancelling woofers to handle load without adding audible vibration. The shape itself also forced acoustic compromises and then careful mitigation. Instead of chasing an impossible “perfect” rear chamber for the M-Array, the engineering team made the chamber as small as practical and then used conventional damping and foam to control resonances.
The three original Hyphn finishes (Standard Finish Collection) – Matte Heritage Green, Matte Black, and Pure Satin White – remain available for USD $99,000 (pair). The custom models cost a little bit more starting at $109,000 for the RAL colors and standard material choices.
Monitor Audio Group is an independent British audio company, designing and manufacturing a range of products sold under the brands Monitor Audio, Roksan, and Blok.
www.monitoraudio.com
