Twenty-one years ago, I had a moment of clarity—the good fortune of hearing, for the first time, Peter Gabriel's "So" CD at a great studio. The control room was fabulous—beautifully constructed and perfectly tuned, with soffit-mounted 813A monitors driven with tons of power.

When Kate Bush's voice came in on "Don't Give Up," the hair on the back of my neck jumped like it never had done before. The audio completely filled that room. It was inescapable and undeniable. No sound was overlooked, no emotion missed. It was total, unobstructed sonic involvement. I've been chasing that experience ever since.

Throughout my audio career—from studio owner, to years at Alesis, to co-founder and president of Event Electronics—I've been intimately involved with speaker development. I learned that near-field monitors can do a pretty good job, but even the best just couldn't deliver my "So" experience. Why? Because even a decent room is subject to problems that cannot be overcome simply by working in the direct field. Comb-filtering from computer screens and consoles, standing waves, uneven first reflections, asymmetrical speaker placement, and poor low frequency diffusion are all still present in the listening environment. And all of these factors affect the accuracy of your listening experience.

I started Equator Audio Research with the intent of delivering a speaker that would overcome these obstacles once and for all, and not only recreate, but surpass my listening experience of 21 years ago. I figured the best hope of doing that was to develop a high-powered, no-compromise, coaxial monitor—à la the 813A—but one modernized with active electronics and wicked-smart DSP.

So I set about assembling the engineering team. First choice: Walter Dick, my long-time friend and co-worker and one of the world’s premier transducer and system engineers. Walter had been a major contributor to the best monitors from Gauss, JBL, Alesis, and Event, and has an amazing history of coaxial design.

Together we looked back at our decades of collaboration and reached out to the most talented engineers we had known. We engaged a system designer who’s been involved with some of the most accurate monitors ever developed. For the digital smarts we turned to a long-time Alesis associate and total DSP guru.

Presenting the Q Series Self-Correcting Biamplified Reference Monitors—custom coaxial designs that deliver true Zero-Point Reference™ monitoring. Gone are the time and phase anomalies found in traditional two-way systems. You get pure, clear, unobstructed detail and imaging in both on- and off-axis listening positions. The Q Series then goes a huge step further, actually analyzing the environment in which they’re playing and digitally correcting for problems. Standing wave cancellation, comb filtering, uneven volume and frequency response . . . gone. The result is accurate, all-encompassing (and loud!) audio—whether you’re in a perfectly tuned control room, or a not-so-perfect home studio.

Getting inspired and producing good music is a lot easier when you can hear everything unobstructed. Q monitors let you hear your music without the audio obstacles. So when the song and performance rise to the occasion, the hair on the back of your neck might just rise to the occasion as well.

Ted Keffalo
President

And I more than approve this message. I live it.