As new players in the studio monitor game, Brooklyn-based Ex Machina has made waves by making some staggering choices with its designs. The brand has come out swinging for the fences and, after listening to these two current releases, it's obvious these decisions have worked for the best.Ex Machina made its big debut at NAMM 2020 with two monitor offerings for different-sized studio spaces. Continue on in this Buyer's Guide to learn more about the brand's technology and these ultra-clear, transparent, and focused studio monitors. Ex Machina Studio Monitor Technology For its monitors, Ex Machina uses a high-performance composite wood called Valchromat to build sealed cabinets that are acoustically inert. This material provides for weighty cabinets that are stiff and dampens any vibrations, ensuring that the cabinet remains dead and doesn't change the sound of your audio coming out. Many of the same characteristics of a cabinet are also desired in the design of a midrange diaphragm. Ex Machina uses a woven thin-ply carbon fiber material called Textreme that is stiff and well-damped, but also extremely light. This ideal stiffness-to-weight ratio is what makes the midrange of Ex Machina studio monitors shine. When it comes to the design of its tweeter, the brand uses a material called GrapheneQ, which was designed specifically for acoustic applications. This is the first time the material has actually been used in a loudspeaker and shows Ex Machina is doing things differently. Typically, titanium is used for many tweeters, but the GrapheneQ actually has a better stiffness-to-weight ratio and makes for a super-wide sweet spot. Last, but not least, Ex Machina has worked DSP into the design of its loudspeakers. While some may still have reservations about DSP-based monitors, the brand has done much to dispel this. Each Ex Machina monitor has its own floating-point SHARC DSP, AKM Velvet Sound-based conversion, and ultra-high precision reclocking circuit from Danville Signa that was specifically designed for this application. Ex Machina Studio Monitors Ex Machina Pulsar Monitors For your smaller rooms, the Ex Machina Pulsar is a monitor choice that is incredibly hard to beat. The Pulsar is an active, 3-way monitor pair that features a 6.5” coaxial driver for the mid’s and tweeter. This is then paired with a powerful 8” woofer that can reach down to a staggering 24 Hz. Housed in Valchromat, Ex Machina’s choice for a very high-quality wood composite, these monitors excel acoustically over the MDF or plywood cabinets being used by many other monitor manufacturers. One of the impressive features of the Pulsar is its DSP integration that ensures the phase and magnitude are linear. Another is the driver material: the tweeter and mid-driver are constructed using domes of Ora GrapheneQ, a material that is well-damped, stiff, and surpasses the performance of silk and paper drivers. With the Pulsar’s outfitting choices, Ex Machina’s goal is to allow you to confidently make better decisions faster, a goal that they achieved with ease on this monitor. Ex Machina Quasar Monitors The middle-of-the-range offering from Ex Machina, the Quasar is a monitor best suited as main monitors in medium-sized rooms, or near-mids in larger rooms. The goal of this set was to produce monitors that maintain hyper accuracy, but are powerful enough to be used as massive, client-pleaser speakers. Not an easy job, but the Quasar excels. This monitor uses their signature coaxial mid/tweeter but is then surrounded on top and bottom by two 8” subwoofers to allow for excellent, accurate low end. The same materials and amenities from the Pulsar are employed here with Valchromat housings and DSP integration. Quasar has a completely flat response down to 30 Hz, and the twin woofers succeed in their job of revealing the true character of your mix’s low end. You’ll find that the Quasar sonically is very similar to the Pulsar, but allows for accurate, linear output at much higher SPLs as well, a necessary feature for larger control rooms and for applications where clients need larger, more immersive playback.
