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Equator D5 monitor loudspeaker
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I'll skip the detailed descriptive stuff; you can look it up on the informative Equator website.
First impressions are that these monitors are small and nearly cute, missing the cute-ness by a hair, due the to all-in-one driver and port baffle with its annoyingly bright blue LED.
Mounted on the rear plate are the IEC mains inlet plus switch, and separate TRS and XLR inputs. The TRS input will defeat the XLR input with a jack inserted. Also on the rear panel are two controls: An input knob with the confusingly labeled ranges +4dBU to -10 dBV. Twiddle and see is my advice, they give a good range from pro gear to consumer.
Back to the front, you get to clock the intriguing concentric drivers. The bass/mid driver is 5.25 inches across, with a nice big voice-coil surrounding the silk dome tweeter in its short flare, which sticks out proud from the base of the speaker cone by about a centimetre. The whole thing looks well built, and nothing pokes out from the front of the boxes, which is neat. The edges of the boxes are nicely rounded, and the finish is a cool textured matt dark grey.
So ... What do the D5s sound like? Rather good overall but with with some problems. The stereo imaging is very good and solid, with a wide sweet-spot. Reverbs are detailed and revealed, but maybe with a little less depth perception than I was expecting. The transient response is good, except at higher levels: I suspect soft limiting is coming in early. This is OK for hyper-compressed material, but not so good with loud dynamic acoustic stuff like tabla, snare and guitar. But you have to remember these are tiny boxes! The mid range is excellent. Well defined, solid. Another good point is that I can hear tiny 'headphony' details like clicks, mouth noises, distortion and so forth that I'd not noticed before on other speakers
Tonally, the D5s have a couple of weak points: A surfeit of high top end, and a really annoying bump centred at 71 Hz. For a product that boasts of special internal Eq tweaking to match each individual box, and a generic voicing by a bevy of mixers and producers, I find these response lumps rather hard to understand, especially the bass one ... Quote: <1.75" Tuned Front Port For Accurate Low-End Extension>. All I can say is accurate to what? On experimenting with a signal generator and my ear two feet away for each D5 in various parts of my studio, it seems the 71 Hz is a port tuning or resonance problem: Block the port, and the bass is even from the low mids and downwards, but is less powerful in the sub 55 Hz regions of course. But I have a sub so to me that matters not. The overall effect of these peaks is to give the D5s a tiring top end after louder monitoring, and a boxy, congested feel on the bottom. The port 'chuffles' with lower frequency loud bass notes, by the way, but is not noticeable on normal mixes.
The boundary setting switch is worth a mention at this stage, as it affects the bass end with its 71 Hz hump. For those who don't know, boundary settings are to help integrate speakers with their positions in rooms, as their bass response will change with the distance from any surface and corner. So, if you place a speaker near the rear wall, the bass response of the speaker will go up, and if in a corner, it will increase even more. The boundary control can be used to compensate to give less bass, thus giving a more accurate bottom end. Likewise, away from walls, you can tweak the bass up to compensate for no walls nearby. So, what are the D5s boundary settings like? They don't work very well, for me, anyway. Yes, they do reduce and increase the bass response, but at the expense of some of the lower mid range, as can be seen on the lower plot. This lack of response of lower midrange gives the speakers the feeling that the mids lack punch, which impression is aided by the slightly boosted high top range. So I find I can't use the Boundary 1 setting; it takes away too much of the mid to lower mids. The Boundary 2 setting is the flattest, with a small lowering of the top-end, and the Boundary 3 gives a bigger bass lift, with a dip in the 1 to 2k region. And too much bass even free from boundaries! But, with a lower frequency switch point and a tamed 71 Hz hump, the Boundary settings would be brilliant, rather than a bit useful.
Are these monitors good value? Well, at a mere $300 direct from the factory they are, and one can learn to live with their funny frequency response, love their fabulous wide mid range, good imaging and neat compactness. For serious mixing I find I have to use a sub, and block the ports, or at the very least constantly check with good headphones. These little boxes make really good location recording monitors. With two fifty watt RMS Class D amps, they go nice and loud for near and mid field monitoring, and run very cool with no need for a heat sink.
Checking out the D5s is really worth doing in North America as Equator do a 60 day money back guarantee if you do't like them, which is good news and makes it a no brainer with the low shipping costs there. But for us in Europe, the cost of importing makes them more expensive, but still worth a look at, though sending them back from here is quite costly.
The Equator website has a lot of detail on it as well as their other intriguing speakers. Well worth visiting.
My conclusions are that the D5 is a good, but flawed speaker. The flaws and be dealt with, however. It's weird that so many positive reviews have not caught that annoying bass bump, though I remember some mentioning the top end bump. As both my D5s do this, I assume that's what they're like, rather than a one-off.
If Equator had made a model with no port, with a sealed box's gentler bass roll-off, a tamed high end, and the Boundary Eq to come in gradually much lower, and the option to switch out the 'voicing', I'd be ecstatic!
I'm trying my D5s with the ports blocked for now, with a matched setting on the sub so I'll see how I get on.
Below are a couple of interesting graphs from the Equator website.
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