Samson MediaOne 3a

So I got these monitors for my little home “studio”. I’m a student so I cant afford any high-end speakers at the moment, but needed some speakers, and tried to find some that played as clear and neutral as possible for my budget, and so I ended with with the MediaOne 3a from Samson.

Well I received them and connected them, but well, on one of the monitors (the Left I believe) the tweeter didn’t work! Oh well, I quickly arranged for the store (musicstore.com) to send a carrier to pick them up, to send them back in, and I received a new working pair after a week or so (which is really good considering I’m in the UK and the store is in Germany).

Anyway, these monitors are cheap, and the review (and the scores given) of them here is all compared to the price paid, using these in a production studio would be crazy, but if you’re beginning production and are on a budget, these are pretty damn good. I would however recommend maybe starting off with the 5” instead of the 3” that I got. The speakers have a small volume button, which is quite annoying to fiddle with, as it is pretty small. Thankfully I have a volume button on my interface (Saffire Pro 14) which I tend to use instead as that one is much more pleasant to use, and also more in reach. There’s also a line-in (for an iPod for example) and headphone-out on the front of the speaker.

The general build quality of the speakers is decent, but these monitors are cheap so don’t buy these expecting top-notch build quality. The material is cheap, but it does the job without I’m feeling they’ll break any moment.
The low end on these are, as to be expected by a 3” speaker, not very good, and it does lack some volume and detail. And I’m generally not a bass-heavy person. The high-end and mid-end however, well I was quite surprised. I didn’t expect much of these small and cheap monitors, but I think these do very well. The sound is generally clean and detailed, and that’s what you want from a studio monitor.

Generally I’m very happy with these, for the price I doubt you’ll find anything nearly as good, and they are a very good alternative to normal desktop speakers if you do any kind of production or if you’re just starting out. While the speakers do lack low-end the general sound experience is clean and detailed. I do recommend if you can afford it starting with the 5” model instead of the 3” as the low-end is, as expected, not so good.