SPL Marc One

The Marc One houses everything you need for comprehensive monitoring. You can audition your projects via two switchable pairs of speakers, along with a subwoofer that’s switched on and off with speaker pair A. Two analog stereo sources and a digital source can be connected, which is enough to hear your mix and reference tracks. Your selected input signal is routed directly to the Marc One’s line-level output, enabling it to loop between devices without sacrificing an output. What’s more, you get three monitoring modes: Stereo, Mono, and Channel Swap.

Speakers and headphones present music very differently. That’s why music mixed on headphones doesn’t “sound right” on speakers (and vice versa). The SPL Marc One evens the playing field with three parameters: Crossfeed, Speaker Angle, and Center Level. In Marc One, the Center Level is preset to -1dB and the Speaker Angle to 30 degrees — values that SPL has determined to reflect the most common real-world conditions. The Crossfeed setting determines the crosstalk between left and right channels, the so-called inter-aural level difference. You can dial in the intensity of the Crossfeed via a front-panel potentiometer.

The Marc One, like every SPL product, uses only the highest-grade analog parts. And the results are stunning, delivering a 10Hz–200kHz frequency range, 121dBu of dynamic range, -99dBu of self-noise, and 0.002% total harmonic distortion. Its USB input is armed with an AK4490 converter chip, which enables sampling frequencies up to 768kHz. Its headphone amplifier’s output stage employs a push-pull Class AB design with ample power to drive a wide range of today’s popular headphone models. The Marc One includes a 12V plug-in power supply unit, along with a secondary internal power supply that generates +/-17 volts for the unit’s analog audio sections, to achieve up to +22dBu of input gain.