OK, so I've had the Monitor Audio Silver 9i for three months now, driving them with my Yamaha RX-V1800 receiver. For the first couple months, I was largely underwhelmed. They just did not seem to have much in the way of dynamics or bass.
It now seems the problem had to do with speaker cabling. I initially used the bi-amp feature of my receiver and used some Morrow SP-2 for the HF terminals and some stranded Monster cable for the LF terminals. As I said above, I just was not impressed with the lack of dynamics and clarity.
Well, as an experiment, I dug out of a closet an old set of Goertz MI-2 Veracity cables. Now, I had used these years ago in another system, but don't remember them being particularly better than other cables I tried at that time.
So, I have no explanation, but there is a huge difference. After installing the speaker terminal jumpers, I connected the MI-2 cables, and disabled the bi-amp feature of the receiver. Apparently, either the Monitors do not like bi-wiring, or the Goertz are just the ticket for these speakers. Not only do I now have much greater and more defined bass, but transient attacks happen, RIGHT NOW. Vocals on music and dialog on movies are the best I've had. At this point, I am finally really enjoying these Monitor 9i, and would recommend them strongly.