A Los Angeles start-up with a map of California for a naming system.

Kali Audio is one of the youngest names in studio monitors. The company says it “was started in January 2018” by people from the professional audio industry, and the trade press agrees on where they came from: JBL. Music Connection reported in January 2019 that Kali was launched “by five former veterans of top audio and speaker company JBL,” and Sound On Sound described it in 2023 as founded “by some former employees of nearby industry giant JBL.”

No complete list of founders appears in the sources we checked, so we name those that do. Sound On Sound wrote in 2021 that Kali was launched by Nate Baglyos, its director of marketing, and Charles Sprinkle, its head of acoustics, “who had both previously held senior positions at JBL”; Music Connection called Baglyos a partner. The company’s early blog posts were published under the name of John Melikyan, and a 2022 post on its website calls Melikyan and Sprinkle “Kali co-founders.” One detail complicates the story: in March 2018 Kali announced Sprinkle’s arrival as a hire, naming him director of acoustics and saying he had been a principal systems engineer at JBL Professional, where it said he had worked on “many award winning studio monitors and portable PA products.”

Baglyos told Music Connection the founders wanted the freedom to put research and development first: “Our experiences working together for several years showed us that when we had the time and freedom to explore, we could make something great.” Studio monitors, he later told Sound On Sound, “made sense as something for us to start with,” being “something that isn’t terribly expensive that would help us get our name out there.”

The company’s own pages place it in slightly different parts of Los Angeles. Its home page says Kali “is headquartered in Los Angeles and has team members dispersed throughout Southern California”; its About page says its “design headquarters is in Burbank, California’s historic audio district.” We found no record of an outside owner.

Lone Pine, Independence, Santa Monica.

Every Kali product line is named after a town or city in California, the company says, under a “Project” label. The first was Project Lone Pine, after the Eastern Sierra town from which climbers set out for Mount Whitney — a debut the company calls “ambitious, challenging, and a little risky.” The LP-6 and LP-8 were unveiled in May 2018 at the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival, in a pop-up studio run with Audiomack, and Music Connection reported that the LP-6 had been on sale since September 2018 at $149. A Bluetooth accessory was called Mountain View, after the town where Google is based; as tech companies kept removing audio connectors from their devices, the company says, the name was “a fun way to put them on notice.”

Reviewing the LP-6 in December 2018, Paul White of Sound On Sound called Kali “a new name in monitoring” whose speakers “strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability,” noting a tweeter set in an asymmetrical waveguide, a front port shaped to reduce turbulence and rear-panel switches illustrated with room-placement diagrams.

The Project Independence range followed with three-way monitors built around what Sound On Sound calls a dual-coincident driver, with the tweeter placed at the apex of the midrange cone. The magazine reviewed the IN-8 in May 2020 and the smaller IN-5 in June 2021, when Phil Ward wrote that if he had an adjective beyond “extraordinary” for its value for money, he would be using it. Because the coincident driver behaves the same whichever way up the speaker is mounted, the range suited Dolby Atmos rooms: in 2023 Sound On Sound described a Kali system built for Studio F at The Village in Los Angeles, designed with measurements gathered at the studio.

At the top of the range is Project Santa Monica, priced from $1,499 a speaker on the company’s website. The SM-5, reviewed in November 2024, added digital inputs and a network socket for Kali’s control software, and Paul White called the SM series “arguably their most ambitious design so far” when he reviewed the SM-8 in February 2026. Subwoofers carry the name Project Watts, and the company’s first headphones, the HP-1 of its Project Highland Park line, were reviewed by Sound On Sound in March 2026.

Design 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.

Designed in California, made in the Far East.

Kali is careful with its wording about origin. Its website says its products are “designed and engineered in California,” and the phrase runs as a strapline across its pages; it does not say they are made there. Sound On Sound has twice been more specific, describing Kali’s monitors in 2021 as “US‑designed and Far East‑manufactured” and in 2023 as “USA designed, Far East manufactured.” We found no source naming the country or the factory, so we go no further than that.

What the company does stress is that it designs the parts that matter. Charles Sprinkle told Sound On Sound in 2023 that designing its own transducers “takes a little bit more development expense,” but lets Kali match each driver to the whole system rather than correcting problems with equalisation: “When you start trying to fix things with EQ, the actual problem is still there.” Phil Ward noted in 2024 that a dust cap glued to the voice-coil former, rather than to the cone, had become “a bit of a Kali signature.” The look is plainer: in 2021 he wished Kali’s “unremitting black finish” were “a little less funereal.”

For a design guide, Kali Audio shows how a young brand can build a recognisable system out of naming alone, giving plain black boxes character with a map of California. Compare KRK, another American studio-monitor brand known for affordable speakers, and Genelec. For this guide we use a granite black, a Sierra blue and a dry-grass gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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