ThieAudio Monarch:
It’s that time of the year again. The time where I finally get my hands on the latest chifi hype and dissect it for your reading pleasure.
Last time I was still relatively in the loop, Thieaudio were kind of a joke brand. None of their stuff was particularly impressive despite being praised heavily by certain community figures, and I personally scoffed whenever I found out about the latest one being yet another fluke. So it did take me for quite a bit of a shock when I found out that their 2 latest IEMs, the Monarch and Clairvoyance, were supposedly hits. It did take me a while to finally get around to hearing them, but here it is.
The bass of the Monarch comes off as a little strange. This IEM is, unsurprisingly, yet another tribrid with the obligatory DD woofer, but I can’t help but feel like it’s lacking in bass slam. The control and transients is solid as should be, but the bass rise is abruptly short in my eyes, and results in the Monarch sounding too lean for my tastes. A sub-100hz rise might be great in the eyes of someone seeking something more neutral, but the way I hear it, it fails to amount to anything substantial in most of the music I listen to. In other words, it may as well just be flat to 20hz with how weightless it feels. Another odd thing I've noticed is that the Monarch's bass texture feels poor. I've listened to my fair share of DDs in my time, and while I don't expect every DD to be held up to the standard of something like the Z1R, it's telling when I find my BA driven U12t to be more resolving down low. Extremely concerning, in fact. On the topic of leanness as well, I can’t help but feel that the tuning exacerbates a timbral incoherency between the DD and the BAs in the midrange. I can see why this clarity uber alles tuning appeals to a lot of people, but it sounds dry and disjointed to me.
Speaking of midrange, the, well, midrange of the Monarch. As mentioned earlier, it’s balls to the wall on maximum clarity, which means upper mids. A lot of upper mids. Maybe a bit too much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hardly a FW10000 or Odin, but at times the Monarch can be a bit shouty and slightly honky, helped in no part by how dry its timbre and tonality is overall. This brings me back to the same point I was getting at in regards to the bass. I don’t think that this tuning does the Monarch any favors, at least not in a hybrid configuration. And again, back to the driver incoherency. The BAs in the midrange essentially sound plasticky to me, helped in no part by the particularly honky nature of the upper mids. This clashes pretty badly with the DD, which alternates between lacking texture and having a bizarre upper bass emphasis that accentuates particularly weird details like string rubbing on bass guitars. I don't think this is the only reason the Monarch sounds incoherent either. The particularly snappy midrange transients don't sound quite right in combination with the slower DD decay. While the DD is by no means slow at all (in fact I would consider it relatively fast), the midrange BAs are simply too fast for their own good, and when combined with the aforementioned timbral incoherency make for a listening experience that I find myself questioning and trying to understand rather than just enjoying.
Electret treble... I fondly recall how much time I’ve spent going on about how electret treble was a waste of time, money, and effort for everyone involved. In all honesty, I don’t think it’s as much of an outright negative now that manufacturers actually know how to tune the damn things, but I still don’t see the net benefit of using them over BA or even DD tweeters. The Monarch’s treble is, in essence, milquetoast sounding. Am I complaining? Not at all. For treble to sound normal is a rarity in and of itself, and I’m all the more appreciative of it. I do find myself desiring more extension, and perhaps more incisiveness on attack transients to bring out more stick impact, but I find little fault with the Monarch’s treble as a whole. Granted, it's still hardly as revolutionary in this department as the likes of the Elysian Annihilator, but it's nice to see that Lee isn't the only person in the world doing electret tweeters with their head screwed on right. But back to the first point, I don't see what the point is of using this over a traditional BA tweeter. The extension isn't much better, and the resolving ability isn't anything to write home about. Sure it doesn't sound bad, but considering this driver has been marketed and pushed as the second coming for well over a year at this point, I'd expect better than not bad. Maybe I'm just wary of it based on past experiences, but in my eyes the Monarch's implementation of the electret tweeter really doesn't justify it at all.
On resolving ability, the ultra-clean sound of the Monarch really does shine true. Possibly one of the most resolving IEMs I’ve heard in the macrodetail department, especially in the midrange, and it's all thanks to how in your face the tuning is with the upper mids. But therein lies the double edged sword - the Monarch's intangibles are crippled by the exact same tonal characteristics. Its timbre is adversely affected by its tuning, with the overly forward sound signature doing nothing to mask the BA timbre and plasticky transient behavior with the Monarch. Dynamics also come off as generally upwards-compressed, with quiet sections sounding far too loud relative to the rest of their respective tracks. And I can't help but feel like it doesn't perform as well at layering as it should for how ultra clear its tuning is trying to be. Anything more than 2 instruments panned in the same location in the mix and it starts inevitably burying some, especially if they occupy the lower mids. And as per usual staging is typically tubed IEM, never really going out of the shell. In all, I feel that beyond pure surface level detail and transient attack performance (if you can even consider that a boon in the Monarch's favor at this point), the Monarch is just not that excellent intangibly.
Maybe I'm asking for too much to compare a $700 IEM to a $1000 Viento or a $2000 U12t, but it feels inevitable when these are what I'm constantly hearing the Monarch get compared to. In my eyes, the Monarch fails to capture the same aggressive upper midrange forward niche that the Viento does, and fails to be as intangibly pleasing (at least in my opinion) as the U12t. Its bass resolution and slam is not even close to the Z1R, and it simply doesn't match up even in the tuning department, which is arguably one of Z1R's weaknesses. I'm left feeling blueballed and unsatisfied by an IEM that clearly strived be something but ended up being kind of in the middle of the road at everything. It doesn't even really have the pricing advantage of something like a Blessing 2, which, as much as I really didn't like the tuning all that much, is much honestly better tuned than the Monarch. The pricing places it squarely in upper mid-fi, and by upper I mean "edging on summit-fi", and if it were my money I would easily decide to drop the extra cash to go all in rather than settle for a barely passing jack of all trades.
All listening was done with the WM1A’s 4.4mm jack.
So in summary, what is the Monarch? I want to say it's not just another chifi fluke and that there is some merit behind it, but the more I listen to it the more I simply feel that it doesn’t appeal to me in the right ways. Is it an admirable IEM? Maybe, but I struggle to like it the more I listen to it. Sometimes I just want a glass of warm water, and the Monarch is all too dry.
Score: 6/10