Recording - December 2011 - 50

BY LORENZ RYCHNER

of a full line-level signal. To initially settle in and warm up the D5 loaner pair for review, I first connected a CD player directly to the TRS inputs, with no means of turning down the volume, and what I heard was good and loud... This lack of an actual full-range volume control on the monitor itself is not a problem in a regular monitoring setup where you control the signal at the source, of course. Controls for room and placement compensation have become fairly common on monitors of late. The D5 has a 3-position Boundary control that allows the user to control bass, from position 3 (selected before shipping, meant for freestanding speaker location) via the intermediate setting of 2 down to a setting of 1 for those who have no choice but to place the D5 where bass is being emphasized by two major nearby surfaces, as in corners etc.. No other information is given about this attenuation, but numbers would be less useful than experimentation anyway—trial and error with the help of those two fleshy pink calibrators on the sides

Equator Audio Research D5 Studio Monitors
Professional design features in an affordable desktop format
The D5 is a remarkable small active monitor from Equator Audio Research, a company that was founded in 2007 by Ted Keffalo, a man with a significant track record going back to companies like Alesis and Event Electronics. Equator has so far produced four monitor models in its Q Series. Each single box of the Q series costs from $1495 (the Q8) up to $3995 (the Q15)—double those amounts for pairs. Now comes the D5, the first in Equator’s D Series; a pair costs all of $299.99, for the time being— an “introductory” price until Equator begins to sell through retail stores. The Equator website states, “How Can We Do It? Selling direct to the end-user allows us to eliminate the margins normally received by a distributor, a retailer, and a factory sales rep.” $749 might become the price once the D5 is available through retail channels. What’s more—at the current price of $299.99, if you don’t like them, you can get a full refund within 60 days. If this offer were to come from a newcomer, and if we didn’t know that Mr. Keffalo and the established Q Series are behind it, could we be blamed for thinking “...red flag...gimmick...”? But in this case we’d be wrong.
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RECORDING DECEMBER 2011

The D5—what do we have here? Its full name, a handful for sure, is revealing: D5 Zero Point Reference Direct Field Monitor—Coaxial Studio Monitor With Internal DSP. The D5, like all Equator monitors, is a coaxial design; for those readers who are new to how studio monitors are built and might only be familiar with “coaxial” as a type of cable, Mike Metlay offers a few words of explanation in the sidebar. The D5 is a small box, 9.75" x 7" x 8.5", light enough to travel for those who like to have their trusty monitors with them wherever they go. Equator sells a carrying case for $39.95. Its fascia reveals its coaxial design with a 5.25" woofer surrounding a 1" tweeter. Below that is the port hole (1.75" in diameter, no tuning frequency given). Power is stated as 100 W (2 x 50 W RMS), with a frequency response of 53 Hz–20 kHz (no deviations listed, no curves shown). Max. SPL is given as 103 dB. Currently the D5 is only available for North American voltage. Inputs are balanced, on XLR and TRS. The website’s Tech Specs page lists a volume control, but this is misleading—the only such control is a Sensitivity knob (on the back) that takes the signal from a –10 dBV sensitivity to the +4 dBu level. That’s not much attenuation

of our heads we’re all born with. I placed my loaner pair out in the open, on two stands, about 6 feet from the nearest surface, in a fairly big and nowhere near perfect room. Boundary setting 3 was adequate. [Equator Audio reports that the Quick Start Guide’s explanation of the Boundary switch is being updated for more clarity. In fact, setting 2 is flat, with setting 1 having less bass (a 2.5 dB rolloff starting at 600 Hz for very bass-heavy positioning such as corners) and setting 3, which is meant for freestanding use as in our tests, having a 1 dB boost from 1 kHz to 15 kHz as well as a 2 dB shelf boost below 1 kHz.—MM] Internal DSP (“for Matched Transducer Output and Meticulous Pre-Set Voicing”) means that the incoming signal is undergoing A/D then D/A conversions. There is thermal protection and short-circuit protection. But enough already, what do they sound like? Listening from top to bottom I soon realized that something special is going on here. Long before I ran the gamut of evaluation material I came to the conclusion that the D5 is neither brash nor mellow, it just sounds—for want of a dictionary’s worth of other words—g-o-o-d. Accurate, detailed, balanced.

Recording - December 2011

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