I have owned both, and both has its strengths and weaknesses. C1 is a great speaker, but I got rid of them because I couldnt stand how ugly they were. Dynaudio Special 25 is the best of both worlds, except they are not quite as smooth sounding as the C1, and dont have quite as much bass as the Manis. My vote is for the Manis, because I like their nice clean simple looks, they have impressive bass for their size, and have been in production for almost 20 yrs. Some other nice monitors to look at would be the older Dynaudio Confidence 3s, and Crafft/C2 monitors. IMHO the Confidence 3s were the best monitors Dynaudio made.