Fifteen years of selling other brands first.

Unity Audio is a British company from north-west Essex that became known for a small range of sealed-box studio monitors named after rocks. It did not start as a speaker maker. Companies House shows that Unity Audio Limited was incorporated in September 1995, with Kevin Walker among its first directors and its business classed as wholesale trade; the company’s website calls Walker its founder. When Sound On Sound reviewed its first monitor in April 2010, Hugh Robjohns described Unity as “a professional-audio product distributor and retailer with a very successful 15-year track record,” which had also helped specify and develop products such as the EchoVerb tape echo, Monolith speaker stands and the Thermionic Culture range of valve processors.

That first monitor, The Rock, was what the magazine called “a brave step into the highly competitive world of monitor loudspeaker manufacture.” Unity had distributed many well-known monitor brands, and its stated aim was a “brutally honest tool” for making mix decisions — a phrase the company still uses as a slogan. Its website says Walker and the studio designer and acoustician Kevin van Green decided from the beginning to use sealed cabinets only, for fast transients and accurate bass, and that the amplifiers were designed by Tim de Paravicini of Esoteric Audio Research, the British amplifier maker.

Birch, Corian and a ribbon tweeter.

The Rock set the pattern. Sound On Sound’s 2010 review described a sealed cabinet of heavily braced, 12mm nine-layer Baltic birch plywood — “a traditional cabinet material from the days before MDF” — with a front baffle machined from Corian, DuPont’s solid-surface material best known for kitchen worktops, and radiused edges to reduce diffraction. The drive units came from the German maker Elac: an aluminium-veneered paper woofer and a ‘Jet’ folded-ribbon tweeter. De Paravicini’s discrete Class-A/B amplifier used output transformers, which the magazine later called “another unusual design choice.”

A three-way Boulder followed, reviewed in August 2012 with twin Elac bass drivers, a coaxial midrange around the ribbon tweeter, an 18mm birch cabinet and a 30mm Corian baffle; Robjohns compared its bass to that of his much larger PMC monitors. By 2016, when the magazine reviewed the Super Rock, it said Unity was “probably just as well known today” for its monitors as for distribution, and listed a family that had grown to include the Avalanche subwoofer, a small Pebble desktop monitor and a Bam Bam bass unit. The Super Rock switched to a SEAS aluminium woofer and a Mundorf AMT tweeter. The Mini Rock arrived in 2018; the company says Pro Sound News Europe named it monitor of the year, and it announced a Rock MK-III and an Avalanche MK-II DSP in 2019 and a Mini Boulder in 2020.

The later models kept the original recipe. The company describes the Rock MK-III as keeping the same size of Baltic birch sealed cabinet and Corian front baffle as earlier Rocks, with a new 7-inch “Crystal Membrane” woofer of the kind used in the Mini Rock and Boulder MK-III, a JET 5 folded-ribbon tweeter, and the same discrete analogue input and crossover circuit as every previous Rock, “ensuring the same sonic footprint.” Sound On Sound had earlier reviewed the original Rock at 11.5kg a speaker and the Boulder at 23kg, with the pair of Boulders priced at £5,160 in 2012.

Unity says every product is “designed, built and tested all in the UK,” and that its cabinets are made in the UK. Its drive units, by its own account and the reviews, come from European suppliers — Elac and Mundorf in Germany and SEAS in Norway.

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.

A website still online; a status we cannot confirm.

Unity’s present status is unclear, and we say so plainly. Its website is still online, listing the Rock MK-III, Super Rock, Boulder MK-III and Mini Boulder alongside hi-fi versions and an AR-1 valve compressor sold under the Lisson Grove name, and giving an address at Little Walden, near Saffron Walden. But its most recent news item is dated April 2021, when it said the band Royal Blood had used its monitors on all their albums. Companies House shows that the original Unity Audio Limited was dissolved in July 2022 after a compulsory strike-off, its last filed accounts covering 2019. A new company of the same name, with Kevin Walker as director, was incorporated in Essex in August 2022 and has since filed accounts as a dormant company. We could not confirm whether the monitors are still being built or sold.

The website also carries testimonials from producers and artists, including Liam Howlett of The Prodigy, and claims that half of the world’s ten best-selling albums of 2015 were made with the help of Unity monitors; we treat these as the company’s own publicity and could not verify the album claim.

For a design guide, Unity Audio shows how materials and names can carry an identity: birch plywood, a machined Corian front and a range called Pebble, Rock and Boulder. Compare PMC and ATC, two other British monitor makers. For this guide we use birch, an off-white and stone grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Unity Audio’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.