Ex Machina Quasar 3-Way Active Studio Monitor - Pair

The Ex Machina Quasar is ideally suited to near-mid to midfield applications in large rooms or as mains monitors in medium sized rooms. Like all Ex Machina monitors, it boasts exceptional off-axis coherence thanks to signature coaxial mid/tweet, complete phase and magnitude linearity, ultra-low distortion and superb transient response. And with twin 8” subwoofers, it also boasts exceptionally deep low frequency extension (flat ±1 dB to 30 Hz), and effortless performance at high volumes. Hyper-accurate tools? Massive sounding client pleasers? With Quasar, you get both.

Cabinet

Ex Machina cabinets are made from a high performance wood composite called Valchromat. Its exceptional rigidity, density, and damping characteristics make the enclosures far more acoustically inert than standard MDF or plywood cabinets.

In addition, the front and side panels use 30 mm thick sheet stock, which allows us to apply a full 1” radius to the front baffle, dramatically reducing baffle diffraction artifacts.

Finally, all cabinets are sealed, which allows the proprietary correction algorithm to flatten both magnitude and phase response all the way to the bottom octaves.

Coaxial

Ex Machina's signature driver is a 6.5” coaxial mid/tweet. The tweeter is a 25 mm, optimized dome made from Ora GrapheneQ, the first free-standing graphene oxide diaphragm ever deployed in a loudspeaker. This revolutionary material that defies traditional expectations, producing a diaphragm that is both stiff and well damped. GrapheneQ is not only as well damped as silk or paper, but also has a better stiffness to weight ratio than titanium. It remains a perfect piston past 30 kHz and exhibits a well controlled breakup beyond that.

Exceptionally detailed yet effortlessly non-fatiguing, with a far wider sweet spot than an AMT or ribbon tweeter.

The midrange is made from a similarly cutting edge material called Textreme, an extremely light and rigid thin-ply carbon fiber whose fiber orientation has been tuned to push the breakup of the cones over two octaves past the in-use passband.

The geometry of the midrange makes it an optimal constant directivity waveguide for the tweeter. Combined with a unique underhung surround, this design gives the loudspeakers their exceptional off-axis performance.

A resonant frequency of 24 Hz, they can reach as deep as most 12-15” subs. And with massive 2” voice coils and titanium formers, they can happily take 250 watts of continuous power all day, every day. These are perfect for when you want more extension and volume than the Pulsar model…

Sealed Enclosure

The exceptional linear excursion performance of the drivers obviates the need for ports or transmission lines. This in turn eliminates the group delay, turbulence, and compression of these more typical cabinet alignments, allowing the DSP to fully linearize the phase all the way down to the low frequency extension limits of the driver itself.

SpeakON Quick Change System

Pre-soldered SpeakON pigtail leads are fitted to all Ex Machina drivers and the Neutrik NL4MP panel mount pass through maintains airtight, mechanically and electrically sound connection to the amplifier chamber while allowing for effortless field servicing.

Processing Modes

“Full” deploys high precision, proprietary DSP linearization for both phase and magnitude response, at the expense of 40ms of latency. “Low Latency” deploys a more traditional IIR based correction for magnitude response only, but only introduces 3ms of latency. This can be useful for tracking applications.

Boundary

By default the Quasar is corrected for free space deployment. Half and Quarter space loading adjustments are available on the rear.

S/N and Calibration Tag

Each speaker is individually measured, calibrated and corrected by one of Ex Machina's senior engineers, in house, and signed once it passes stringent tolerance requirements. Consecutive serial numbers are not required for stereo or surround matching.

DSP/Conversion

As Ex Machina's correction process is computationally demanding, each speaker is fitted with its own SHARC DSP and high performance conversion. Very low jitter reclocking, high performance analog circuitry and AKM Velvet Sound conversion contribute to the sonic transparency of the DSP hardware and conversion stages.

Amplification

The Hypex Ncore NC122MP and NC252MP modules provide everything you could ask for in an amplifier – vanishingly low distortion, superb efficiency, negligible output impedance, wide-band frequency response and phase/magnitude linearity and a healthy 700 total watts of output power per channel.