Hey, I was looking at bows and recently purchased a Mathews Monster. I am writing this becuase most the posts I found about the monster were outdated and had me concerned about buying this bow. I upgraded from a PSE Nova Team Fitzgerald Edition that I have used for almost ten years now. I tried out many bows, including Hoyts, Mission (yes it's mathews), pse's, diamond's (don't have a bowtech dealer close so had to go to Dick's, Gander Mountain, and Cabela's outside of mylocal archery shops.) I can say that I was impressed with all of these bows, the new Hoyt's made an excellent impression with me; however, my form (which I know is bad) caused problems with the back part of the riser, basically my wrist would push against it and introduce torque into the bow. Other than that the Maxxis and I think it was the Alpha Max were very nice shooting bows. I was amazed by just how quiet and dead in hand all these bows were compared to the one I had! I ended up choosing the Monster because I have a dealer close by who can help me with it and because for me it shot good. Mine is set up at 60 lbs. with a 28" draw and the Dead end String Stop. With a 450 grain arrow it shoots around 270 fps. My hunting bows are 400 grains, and it shoots them around 292-295 fps. For giggles, I had the dealer turn my limbs up and we shot an IBO legal arrow (i believe his weighed about 355 grains) and the chrono showed a slowest speed of 335 and a fastest speed of 350. Not sure why the difference, maybe had to do with string slap on my sleeve? As far as accuracy, I have no problem, at twenty five yards I am consistently grouping arrows and have nicked several feathers and broken a couple of nocks. I will say that when I do make a bad shot it DOES tend to go farther astray than my old PSE. However, I have not yet pulled a shot outside of the vital area. I work full time and do not get as much time to practice as I would like, so I was concerned about the forgiveness of the 6" brace height (Mine is not the XL8R). Now I do not worry about it. This bow, for me anyways, is a very decent shooter and I don't believe anyone should be scared of it for hunting. What I like about it is that I was able to drop ten pounds off my draw weight (my PSE was 70 lbs.) and I picked up right at 100 FPS on my hunting arrows. While I'm not a speed freak this resulted in my kinetic energy going from around 41 ft./lbs. to 70.5 ft./lbs. roughly. One issue some people may have with this bow is string slap. Like I said, I don't have perfect form and after shooting twenty or thirty arrows I really have to concentrate on form or my arm pays the price. As noted elsewhere this bow does have a pretty decent ridge right before the let-off, however this doesn't bother me. What I do like is that at full draw it is extremely easy to hold. In fact, at times I feel as if I have to "push" the string to get the bow to draw down. You do have to concentrate while letting this bow down to do it "smoothly". Of course, the ultimate test will come this spring as I try to take my first turkey ever with it. I hope this review will help somebody who is looking at this bow and can only find the older reviews that are based more on speculation and hype than actual experience with the bow. If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask, also, as I get to spend more time with this bow, I'll try to update the thread if I change my mind on anything.
