M-Audio CX8 Studiophile active monitor review part one
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Music Technology
Two M-Audio CX8 active studio monitors have just spent the day at my humble project studio. Having recently reviewed its smaller sibling the CX5 (after much industry and DV staff tongue wagging about just how good these monitors are), I was looking forward to seeing if these rather large units carried my enthusiasm further.
The CX8s via the supplied kettle lead are ‘mains’ connected, active monitors, which of course means there’s no necessity for a separate power amp, just either a (not supplied) balanced 1/4″ jack in or unbalanced phono to feed your audio signal through. As mentioned earlier, they are quite large, measuring around 17″ in height with a width of 11″ and nearly 13″ in depth (including the rear grill). They are also literally built like a tank – a very aesthetically pleasing tank, I’d add. As with the smaller CX5s, there’s reassuringly little chance that anything within the cabinet will resonate and cause irregular low frequency responses. The individual units are protected too from those occasional speaker ‘pops’ via a transient on/off safety feature.
Each unit is driven by two separate amplifiers feeding the 80W, 8″ kevlar woofer and 40W, 1.5″ tweeter. According to M-Audio, the radiused tweeter surrounding (called a contoured waveguide) is there to spread the higher frequency content gently around the room, delivering extended clarity in the process.
As with the smaller model, the M-Audio CX8 active has a rear panel of multi-array, acoustic ‘corrective’ switches, which have been provided to bed the unit into a user’s specific listening environment. The nearby gain knob is small, but has a centre point click stop to at least make sure that both paired monitors are at the correct unified gain. There is a three-position HF (high-frequency) trim switch and an MF (mid-frequency) in/out switch too, enabling the user to tailor the CX8 to a particular acoustic space (reflections, size, wall proximity factors etc). Likewise, another three-way switch allows selection of a low frequency cut-off point at either 60Hz, 80Hz or ‘flat’.
Continuing the model similarities, the unit delivers a flat, or linear response by utilising yet another selector, this time labeled the ‘acoustic space’ switch. This helps when the user has no choice but to position their monitor(s) at, or less than, 12″ away from a rear wall (making rear projected bass sound waves reflect, exaggerate and colour the LF response). This switch again has multi-positions: ‘flat’, for positioning at least one foot away from a wall, at -2dB for anything closer than 12″, and -4db for the unit being placed less than a foot away from a corner of a room (when two walls intersect, for example). Incidentally, the latter two settings reduce the 200Hz frequency by the indicated dB levels.
In part two of this M-Audio Studiophile active monitor review, I’ll be looking at the unit’s performance aspect across a broad range of test sound sources.
Tags: CX8, CX8 active monitor, m-audio