Martin Audio

Martin Audio is a loudspeaker company.

Martin Audio was founded by Australian audio engineer David Martin in 1971 to manufacture and supply touring sound reinforcement systems for the supergroups of the day that included Pink Floyd and Supertramp.

Martin Audio's early folded horn bass cabinet design (known as Martin Bins) was typical of the industry standard in the 1970s. Today, Martin Audio supplies systems across the spectrum of sound reinforcement applications from the high power levels demanded by large touring acts to classical ballet or small theme bars, for example.

Martin audio designs aim for flat frequency response in the acoustic design in preference to electronic equalisation. Martin use horn loading in large cabinets, preferring hyperbolic profiles in bass horns and exponential horns driven by cone drivers for mid-range. This was pioneered by senior R&D engineer Rod Short.

Smaller systems use a more conventional approach using reflex-loaded cone drivers and bandpass subwoofer designs.

Martin released the Wavefront series of loudspeaker systems in 1995.

The large format W8 cabinets use two horn-loaded 12-inch and one 6.5-inch cone driver for low-mid and high-mid respectively and a 1-inch compression driver/horn assembly for high frequencies. The more popular W8C reduces cabinet size and weight by omitting one of the 12-inch drivers.

The original Wavefront subwoofer (W8S) used an unconventional design based on a horn-loaded 15-inch driver and a reflex loaded 18-inch driver in separate acoustic chambers within a single cabinet with identical dimensions to the W8. These devices operate over the same frequency range, yet for best results one driver needs to be delayed relative to the other. The W8S has largely been superseded by the larger WSX subwoofer, which is a folded horn S-bin design based on a single 18-inch driver.

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