My mate Big Mick is the front-of-house engineer for Metallica and has the record for the largest sound system ever assembled. It was 1,200,000W and was for 1,500,000 people at the Monsters of Rock festival in Russia, which took place after the Iron Curtain came down.

After all, speaker systems have to suit the amount of people assembled, or the space they are expected to cover; the THX Select and Ultra specifications, for instance, are all about the cubic capacity or volume of the room the systems are designed to fill.

And when it comes to cinema, the same rule applies to the space in any given room. Whether a living room in suburbia or a huge country barn extension, the size of the speakers you need will vary accordingly.

Now, I have a nice home and a lovely room that helped sell the house to me in the first place, as the fireplace has been removed and we can have a classic 5.1 system setup around where we like to sit. A Swiss chalet would go down well, especially in our lovely long garden, but I don't have that kind of cash.

So, if a set of speakers is suitable for a magnificent home, I tend to gravitate towards them. These are right on the edge of that criterion. Not because they are especially huge (they are about the size of the B&W 800 series, and the Monitor Audio Platinum Series front tower does get bigger than the one I had to play with), but because they are so lavishly and beautifully packaged.

Often it's advisable to keep cartons in the loft for future use, especially in the event of a house move, but these MDF ended, band-strapped, Velcro-sealed wonders were as heavy empty as some cartons are when full!

Once I had got over the heebie jeebies and worked out that I had to ask nicely for the boxes to be kept at HCC Towers, I unpacked some of the most weightily attractive speakers I have ever seen.

These speakers make a real statement, having been designed from the ground up, I was told, to be as fabulous as Monitor Audio can make them, both from the engineering and sonic points of view.

Animal magnetism

The design is first-rate: they have really strong gripping embedded Neodymium magnets to hold the snazzy, bent metal mesh grilles on their top-grain leather hide faces; Monitor Audio's signature branded front edges are present on the lavish cast chassis of the speaker drivers themselves; there are sexy metal trim bits on the top leading edges of the enclosures with the name engraved upon it; and the terminals are paired sets of lavishly made binding posts, complete with well engineered jumper pieces.

The latter even have a foam-lined home (in case you are going to bi-wire/bi-amp) in a box you get with the speakers. This also packs a spirit level and Allen-headed screwdrivers to assemble stands and feet.

Monitor audio platinum pl200av 5.1 system detail

The towers' feet themselves are delicious assemblages of precision engineering and can be used with the stubby, ovoid shiny-plated, multi-piece spikes, or else with those unscrewed and the rubbery polymer ring-grippers applied instead. These can optionally be used in a heavier-duty version under the awesomely pretty subwoofer.

The PLW15 sub has a huge kilowatt beast of an amplifier inside, and that mighty 15in cone is a ceramic metal alloy material (C-CAM) and sits under a big grille with turned metal stand-off legs.

The cones in the rest of the speakers are made of a skinny layer of this ceramic alloy on a Nomex honeycomb, which makes them unfeasibly light yet rigid.

The final cherry on the cake is the tweeter. A 'ribbon' type, it is a tiny sliver of C-CAM material, which acts as both voice coil and diaphragm, and as it weighs so little it can accelerate like a brute and can reach up to 100kHz. (And to think that at 20kHz it means 10,000 gravities of acceleration!)

But the overall finish is so lustrous and rich it made me feel guilty, as I'm not aware of any 'sustainable' Ebony plantations. If I am right, this speaker is covered in a veneer so rare and delicious, its use is obscenely unfriendly to the environment. It is quite the most luscious and beautiful speaker finish I have ever seen, and an awful lot of Monitor Audio fans will take one look and just hurt for wanting them.

But this 5.1 system offers far more than looks: the smarts are intense and that woofer is as clever as a weasel, yet without needing a room-EQ programme, microphone or boffin to set up.

I silenced the eco-conscience with the thought that, after all, this ain't no mass market product, and slid the J J Abram's Star Trek into my Sony Blu-ray spinner.