Recording - December 2011 - 51

In the highs I heard amazing detail in telltale sounds like the highest-pitched of bell trees and triangles. No crunch, no fuzziness and breakup, no sharp stabs at the ear drum, just exquisite clarity. Ditto for overtones of cymbals on acoustic jazz records where no compression had been used to mess with the cymbals. Avedis Zildjian would smile in his Armenian grave if he knew what the D5 is doing to his successors’ cymbals... The silk and the rosin from high strings was just “there”, not trying to jump out and impress me, but not hiding behind false resonances, either. The crossover (no frequency listed) is described in the Tech Specs as “Steep 4th Order L&R Crossover with DSP Compensation for Reduced Mid-Range Distortion”. If this means you shouldn’t hear it, then they succeeded. Try as I might, I couldn’t discern it—there was no smear, no tonal bump, nothing giving away the point where the woofer yields to the tweeter. The mids have the presence they need to reveal complex voicings and to help with accurate localization. Vocals stand out where they are supposed to be standing out, but without an edge. With a speaker this good it is fun to hunt down details in otherwise familiar recordings, in some cases providing an entirely new listening experience. You’ll hear things you didn’t know were there, for better or for worse. Critical items come across clearly—quite likely also due to the time-alignment of the coaxial design. The lows are an area that will be debated among diehards who don’t believe in ported cabs. Suffice to say that I heard no hint of “one-note-bass”. What I did hear— without using a subwoofer, Equator currently makes none—was as good as it gets for a small speaker to which you’re meant to listen from up close. I didn’t plug the porthole during my listening evaluations, let alone involve a subwoofer. That could be an interesting exercise. But I saw no need; the low end was satisfactory beyond expectations from such a small box. Summary Some serious design wizardry must have gone into the making of the D5, for it doesn’t sound like just another useful small box that will do the job adequately. It sounds like more than that. If you are in the market for a fresh set of speakers, take advantage of the 60-day refund guarantee and of the remarkably low introductory price—you literally can’t go wrong. Price: $299.99/pair (direct from Equator only) More from: Equator Audio Research, www.equatoraudio.com

What’s A Coaxial Speaker? Coaxial speakers have been around for a long time, and companies like Urei and Tannoy have taken them to significant levels of development. The idea of a coaxial speaker is simple: two drivers share an axis, meaning they’re not next to one another on the speaker cabinet but actually built so that one is inside the other—the tweeter or horn actually lives at the center of the woofer. The science behind this design is straightforward. If we strive for accurate sound from a monitor, we would like signals from the various speakers within the cabinet to all arrive at our ears at precisely the same time. Even a very small time delay between sound waves hitting our ears from the tweeter and from the woofer can cause phase cancellation, resulting in a less accurate sound. Makers of coaxial speakers believe that the best way to time-align sounds from two different speakers is to build them together so that all of their audio effectively radiates from one point. (That is the “Zero Point Reference” in the D5’s name.) No matter how you position such a monitor, you simply can’t create time delays between audio arriving from woofer and tweeter. It’s possible to reap significant benefits by combining coaxial elements in one box with other speaker types (like Urei’s dual woofers or Tannoy’s “supertweeter”); the D5, of course, only has two speakers in the box, in a coaxial arrangement.—MM

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Recording - December 2011

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