Ex Machina Soundworks began as a rebellion against the status quo in audio. Tired of the tacit, creeping compromises we all take for granted as the cost of making music, we set out to create something different entirely. Something paradigm changing. Combining a true diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and expertise, from artificial intelligence and DSP, to circuit design, to acoustical and materials science, to 30+ years of recording and music making experience, we set out to push the envelope of what is scientifically possible in loudspeaker design. All with one goal in mind: shorten the gap between you and your art. Make your moves clearer, your process faster, the details obvious, your window vast. So you can have no doubts in the choices you make.
Simply put, we made the speakers we wanted for ourselves. Because no one else did.
Our Commitment to Sustainability
From the very outset of our journey when we started Ex Machina, we all agreed that building an environmentally conscious product was a top priority for us. In particular, we felt it was crucial to demonstrate that renewable designs and processes can and should be integral to meaningful performance progress. Every choice we have made in our loudspeaker designs, from our amplifier choices to our materials science to our unorthodox decision to commit to local, urban manufacturing has been informed by this critical requirement, and without fail, every ecologically responsible choice we have made has improved the performance and efficiency of our products as well. These choices are woven into the fabric of countless small details in our designs, but here are a few of the big ones that we feel make a real difference.
The Valchromat® we use for our cabinets is a non-toxic, FSC certified material, with none of the harmful glues and formaldehyde of more traditional engineered wood products.
The Rubio Monocoat® we use to seal the cabinets is a plant based, zero VOC finish that provides our striking and durable matte finish without the need for toxic compounds or spray booths.
Our large radius, mortise and tenon joined cabinet geometries not only dramatically reduce baffle diffraction artifacts, but are precisely optimized for optimal panel usage. Less than 15% of each raw Valchromat® sheet we purchase is wasted to kerf thickness or off-cuts.
The ultra-high performance Hypex Ncore® amplifiers we employ are extremely efficient, waste far less energy as heat than comparable Class A/B designs, and exhibit very low idle losses.
Our space age diaphragm materials are extremely light, allowing for significantly more output per watt than competing traditional materials. Our coaxials, for instance, produce 93db/watt.
Our finishing, CNC processing, sub-assembly, calibration and shipping facilities are all local to us in Brooklyn, minimizing the shipping distance that our parts need to travel from raw material to finished product.