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Monoprice Monolith M570 Headphones Review

A beefy pile of off-the-shelf audio majesty

Alex Rowe
6 min readSep 11, 2020
Photo taken by the author.

I don’t usually buy in when a new hyped-up planar magnetic headphone comes out, because they’re either priced outside of my personal budget restrictions or they’re built by HiFiMan, a company with a reputation for questionable build quality.

For the last few years, Monoprice has tried to disrupt that market by offering the performance of higher end planar magnetic audio hardware within cheaper designs built to hit the prices expected by mainstream audio enthusiasts. They’ve been dancing around that value sweet spot with several models now, and this time I think they completely nailed it.

Photo taken by the author.

The Monoprice Monolith M570 is an open-back, planar magnetic headphone that carries a standard retail price of $299 (official site here), and sometimes gets discounted further. I was lucky enough to purchase a pair from Amazon for the absurd price of $199. It uses the same OEM planar drivers as the significantly more expensive Sendy Aiva($600), Blon B20($450), and Sivga P-2($400) headphones alongside a metal headband used on most of Sivga’s budget studio lineup.

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Alex Rowe
Alex Rowe

Written by Alex Rowe

I post commentary about gaming, tech, and sometimes music. I’ve written professionally about games since 2005. Look mom, I’m using my English degree!

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