Kali Audio have announced the launch of a new eight-inch monitor that joins their flagship Project Santa Monica (or SM-Series) line-up. Combining the company’s proven three-way coincident architecture with top-quality components and skilled craftsmanship, the SM-8 is aimed at critical production applications, and promises to deliver unparalleled imaging, accuracy and detail.
The latest addition to the range combines an eight-inch woofer and four-inch midrange driver with a coaxial one-inch metal-dome tweeter. As with the company’s acclaimed IN-Series loudspeakers, the SM-8 produces an acoustical point source, and Kali Audio say that special care has been taken with the unique geometry around the midrange driver, ensuring that the design offers ideal directivity characteristics. The result is said to be a crisp, lifelike stereo image, while the off-axis lobing that affects two-way loudspeakers is virtually eliminated.
Equal attention has been paid to the transducers themselves, which have all been precision-engineered to deliver a high dynamic range, smooth response and low distortion figures. The woofer design has been refined, and now incorporates features that lower distortion by reducing magnetic flux modulation, while the midrange driver has been optimised not only for its own frequency handling, but also for its role as the tweeter’s waveguide. The tweeter itself boasts a special geometry designed to reduce high-Q ultrasonic resonances, a move which the company say eliminates the harsh sound that’s often associated with metal-dome designs.
All of these features lead to some impressive performance figures: the specified THD of the loudspeaker is less than 0.5%, and the frequency response is down by -10dB at 37Hz. With 300W of total power, the SM-8 can deliver peaks of 119 dB SPL, allowing for reference-level listening at up to five meters from the loudspeaker.
The SM-8 is also equipped with user-editable DSP, which offers some powerful functionality such as parametric EQs, delays and per-loudspeaker trims for room calibration — everything is processed natively on the speaker’s own DSP chip, resulting in low latency figures. Users are able to program the DSP features using a USB drive plugged into the speaker, or by networking speakers together via Ethernet. While networked, changes in processing settings happen in real time, and it’s possible to quickly toggle between multiple tuning profiles.
Pricing & Availability
The SM-8 is available now in the USA, with worldwide availability soon to follow, priced at $2499 each.
