I’m always on the hunt for the next great deal in home audio. Anytime someone promises me I’ll be floored by the performance of a piece of gear, especially for its price, I’m immediately interested. But when I start hearing things like “there’s nothing else like it on the market right now,” well, that’s when the skepticism sets in and I feel like I have no choice but to investigate.

That’s how the Monolith Encore T6 and THX-465T speakers ended up in my testing lab. They are two very different speakers that promise to shatter the price-to-performance barrier. So, do they? Are they the best-kept secret in home audio and home theater? Let’s find out.

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The many brands of Monoprice

I’ve had my eye on Monoprice’s audio gear since it started releasing products under its Monolith sub-brand. This is a popular thing for companies to do when they sell a lot of different kinds of products. Take Anker, for instance. That’s a company that gained some fame by producing great mobile accessories like portable charging batteries and the like. But as Anker decided to get into making and marketing projectors and speakers and earbuds, it developed sub-brands for those products. For instance, Anker’s projectors fall under the Nebula brand, and its audio products fall under its Soundcore brand. And they are good products!

Similarly, Monoprice offers loads of products, from TV wall mounts and HDMI cables to coolers and duffel bags to computer monitors and keyboards. When you sell such an eclectic collection of stuff, I suppose it makes sense to create subbrands. And so Monoprice puts computing stuff under the Dark Matter brand, Outdoor Gear under its Pure Outdoor brand, and audio gear under, you guessed it, the Monolith brand.