Briefly introduce yourself

My name is Tom Fall, I’m the Global Head of Quality for Monitor Audio Group. My team and I make sure that products meet our internal standards, as well as any regulatory ones, from the first production run to the last.

Can you explain the lengths we’ve gone to ensure that Blok is more than just a piece of furniture – some of the processes we go through and how quality integrates within the product development and design process?

As a business we wanted Stax 2G to fit seamlessly into the Monitor Audio Group ecosystem, as well as integrating with other manufacturers products.

For us, that meant applying the same levels of rigour to the design and engineering as we would for a loudspeaker or amplifier. Ensuring that every component, visible or not, would meet our standards for fit and finish as well as long term reliability. That’s something you can’t add in later, so the Quality Department are involved from the very first design steps, providing advice and suggestions on materials and design elements to ensure that we design our products to be manufacturable, reliable and repeatable from the start.

Would you be able to tell us about any specific tests and what that means to the user of Blok Stax 2G?

Obviously with a modular design like Stax 2G, we’ve had to ensure that every supported combination of modules fits together beautifully and the combined weight loading of each shelf has no effect on the system as a whole.

We ran extensive load tests to find the maximum weight loadings for the different shelf options, testing the shelves to literal breaking point. We then used that data to calculate the maximum weight that each shelf within a system would be subject to, and testing it in the real world for extended periods. Tests like this mean that we can confidently say that Stax 2G is able to support the heaviest electronics on the market, or shelves full of vinyl records, and grow with you as your system evolves without the need for replacement parts.

Could you mention elements where we have been considerate to the materials we have used?

With Stax 2G we really wanted to make a product that embraced the idea of sustainable materials while also engineering it to last, to cut down on the lifetime impact of the product.

That’s one of the main reasons we chose plywood for the wooden shelf options, it’s a sustainable material but equally one that is incredibly robust and can be machined and treated in ways to make it visually appealing. We also wanted to try and minimise the impact of packaging on the environment, so we took the decision early on to stop using polystyrene that can’t be recycled, and instead moved to recyclable Expanded Polyethylene (EPE) to protect all parts.