A young company, and not a Canadian one.

Ex Machina Soundworks is sometimes described as Canadian; the sources we checked say otherwise. Sound On Sound introduced it in 2021 as a “New York-based startup,” Tape Op placed it in Brooklyn, and the company says all its products are “proudly designed, built and calibrated in Brooklyn, New York.” We found no Canadian headquarters. There is one real Canadian link: the tweeter diaphragms of its first monitors were made from GrapheneQ, a material that Sound On Sound said was manufactured by Ora Sound in Canada.

The company is young. It says it officially released its first products at the Winter NAMM show in January 2020 in Anaheim, California, where it showed the Pulsar and Quasar monitors; its archived homepage from that year carried the line “Born And Built In Brooklyn.” We did not find a founding date in the sources we checked, so we do not give one.

The founding team is not fully documented either. A 2022 article on the company’s blog calls Dev Avidon an Ex Machina co-founder, and says the engineer Patrick Derivaz worked on Avidon’s albums She Makes Noise (2007) and Tears of Men (2012). The company’s “Meet the Team” page, archived in 2022, introduced its staff by first name only. Its About page describes a group combining artificial intelligence and DSP, circuit design, acoustics and materials science, and “30+ years of recording and music making experience,” and says the business “began as a rebellion against the status quo in audio.” Its stated aim is simpler: “we made the speakers we wanted for ourselves.”

Phase correction, exotic diaphragms, sealed boxes.

The engineering is what reviewers wrote about. In its March 2021 review of the Pulsar, Sound On Sound described a three-way active monitor with a dual-concentric midrange and tweeter, a graphene-composite tweeter dome, a midrange cone of TeXtreme carbon fabric from the Swedish company Oxeon, and a custom 220mm aluminium bass driver from SEAS of Norway in a sealed box, with crossovers at 200Hz and 2kHz and steep 48dB-per-octave filters. Analog Devices SHARC processors handle the crossovers and correction, AKM chips handle conversion, and Hypex Ncore class-D modules supply the power. The cabinet is made of Valchromat, a coloured wood-fibre board, and each speaker weighed 25kg.

The feature reviewers singled out was phase correction. The Pulsar can run in a low-latency mode that corrects only amplitude, or in a high-latency mode that also corrects phase, so that all three drivers deliver an impulse together. The reviewer measured one of the flattest responses he had seen, preferred the phase-corrected mode on voices, listed no cons and called it “one of the most capable nearfield/midfield monitors” he had heard. The price was $7,999 a pair in the US. Tape Op’s Brian Bender, reviewing the larger Quasar in early 2021 at $11,499 a pair, wrote that it was “really, really flat” and “in no way flattering.”

The company’s FAQ puts numbers on the trade-off: about 46ms of latency in full-processing mode and less than 3ms in low-latency mode. It also says it is unlikely to make a standalone subwoofer, because its phase alignment depends on known distances between the drivers; instead it builds long-throw bass drivers into its three-way designs.

The company kept the same recipe as the range grew. It added the Ganymede, which it calls its first dedicated nearfield; the TITAN, a four-speaker Dolby Atmos package with extruded aluminium cabinets, which it announced in April 2023; and the Arcturus, a flagship main monitor for soffit mounting with twin 26cm SEAS subwoofers, announced that August. The current lineup also includes the Terra coaxial monitor with its matching Gravity subwoofers, and the Selene, a 6.5-inch cube for immersive audio, with the Poseidon subwoofers. Its diaphragms are now developed with Composite Sound, the company says.

Monitors and documentation.

Many studio monitors come from smaller companies, often led by their designers. The seven in this guide are spread across the United States, Britain and Germany, and much of what is known about them comes from their own websites.

Barefoot Sound began in a San Francisco garage, where Thomas Barefoot, a physicist and engineer according to English Wikipedia, built his first monitors; he and Tedi Sarafian formed the company in 2006. It is now based in Portland, Oregon, and says it works with “trusted global manufacturing partners.” Kali Audio, started in 2018, has its design headquarters in Burbank, California; its co-founders include Charles Sprinkle, formerly of JBL Professional, the company says.

Ex Machina Soundworks, which names no founders online, says its machining, finishing and calibration take place in Brooklyn, New York. Augspurger Monitors, of Hanover, Massachusetts, is run by Dave Malekpour and says it is not affiliated with George Augspurger, the acoustician whose designs it grew from.

In Britain, Quested says it was founded in 1985 by Roger Quested, a former London studio engineer, and that its products are hand-built in the UK; its address is in Devon. Unity Audio, in Essex, names Kevin Walker as founder and says its products are designed, built and tested in the UK. In Berlin, EVE Audio was founded in 2011 by Roland Stenz, who, it says, had co-founded ADAM Audio; it says its speakers are assembled there.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Local manufacturing as a selling point.

Where Ex Machina makes its speakers is part of its pitch. The company says its finishing, CNC machining, sub-assembly, calibration and shipping are all done locally in Brooklyn, and that it has moved into new facilities in East Williamsburg; its archived contact details from 2020 show an earlier address in Greenpoint. It links that “local, urban manufacturing” to a set of sustainability claims: FSC-certified Valchromat cabinets, a plant-based finish, less than 15 per cent waste from each board, efficient class-D amplifiers and a commitment to 100 per cent renewable power. We give those as its claims; we did not find independent checks of them.

The business appears to be privately held; the sources we checked named no outside owner, investor or acquisition. Its website links to retailers in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Poland, Australia and New Zealand, among others, including a Canadian distributor — one possible reason it is sometimes taken for a Canadian company. Its slogan is “Precision. Not Prestige.”

For a design guide, Ex Machina Soundworks shows how a young brand can lean on measurements and materials rather than heritage. Compare Kii Audio and Dutch & Dutch, two DSP-driven monitor makers whose speakers Sound On Sound named as alternatives to the Pulsar. For this guide we use near-black, graphite and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ex Machina Soundworks’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.