This is the new MR5 from Edifier, the company behind the well-received MR4. I’m curious to see if it can become a new legend in the budget category.
It uses an active–passive configuration, where one active speaker receives all the input signals and sends them to the passive unit. I give high marks for supporting RCA, TRS, and XLR inputs. There are also shelving filters to adjust bass and treble levels.
What really sets this speaker apart in its price range is its unusual structure. The tweeter–midrange driver is exposed on the front panel, while a 5-inch woofer is hidden inside a side-mounted slot.
It’s impressive that they’ve managed to produce an active 3-way speaker at this price point — around KRW 120,000–130,000 as of August 15, 2025.
Frequency Response
Overall, the balance is quite flat, with bass extension reaching down to about 48.2 Hz (-6 dB). It did not disappoint.
Before moving on, I’d like to briefly revisit my measurement system and methodology.
I use the Merging Nearfield and Farfield Method to measure a loudspeaker’s response.
When the measurement environment and procedure are well-controlled, this approach offers high reliability in the mid- to high-frequency range. However, in the time domain, the lower measurement limit depends on the gap (time difference) between the direct sound and the first reflection when applying window gating. With my 5 ms window, the theoretical lower limit is about 200 Hz, and I typically merge the nearfield and farfield responses two to three octaves above that to be on the safe side.
For this product, however, the woofer-to-midrange crossover point lies below 200 Hz, which meant I couldn’t obtain a fully accurate merged response using my usual method.
Without going into every technical detail, in such cases I take multiple farfield measurements at varying time/position settings, progressively reducing error until I find the most reasonable merge region and matching level. This approach has allowed me to measure other 3-way loudspeakers—such as the KEF Blade Two Meta and Genelec 8331A—without significant issues.
This time, though, was different:
The woofer is hidden inside the cabinet, and its low-frequency output only emerges through side-facing slits.
Naturally, I still aimed to get as close to an accurate response as possible—and to verify that result.
The “secret weapon”: In-Situ Compensation
This technique uses a reference loudspeaker with a known anechoic response.
While it’s extremely difficult to fully model how a room imposes dips, peaks, and other distortions on a loudspeaker’s output, we can treat it as a function of the relative positions of the room, speaker, and microphone.
The idea is:
- Measure the reference speaker in the room.
- Divide that measurement by its true anechoic response to isolate the room’s transfer function.
- Measure the target speaker in the same position.
- Divide that result by the room’s transfer function to (theoretically) recover the target’s anechoic response.
Of course, this is an idealization—this works perfectly only if the reference and target loudspeakers have identical radiation characteristics. In reality, differences in woofer and port size, position, and dispersion patterns will always cause some deviations.
As shown above, I used the anechoic response of my AsciLab C6B sample to derive the room’s transfer function in my measurement space. Placing the MR5 in the same position and applying that correction produced the orange trace above.
The narrow peaks you see are caused by small differences in driver layout, component positions, and directivity, but they’re still sufficient to confirm how closely the merged nearfield + farfield result tracks the In-Situ Compensated curve.
And indeed, the merged response followed the compensated response very well.
Nearfield Measurements
The port response is clean, just as I’d hoped given the large port and generous flaring for its size. That said, the woofer’s operating range is inherently limited by the 3-way crossover, which might be why port noise isn’t obvious.
The mid–tweeter crossover doesn’t overlap, and there’s a noticeable boost in the tweeter response around 4 kHz — possibly intentional, or perhaps to create a broad dip centered around 5–6 kHz.
CEA-2034
Aside from the unusual 4 kHz feature, the smooth tonal balance and DI are quite good. Woofer placement causes some directivity around 100 Hz.
Directivity
In the highest frequencies, dispersion widens, but given the FR and listening window, this seems like an optimal compromise. Despite the shallow waveguide, the relatively high ~3 kHz crossover keeps any mid/tweeter directivity mismatch from becoming pronounced.
A narrower gap between tweeter and midrange might have been preferable with such a high crossover, but there are many design trade-offs to consider.
Line Chart
Most horizontal angles show smooth attenuation — except around 4 kHz, which remains an oddity.
As seen in the contour plot, the crossover region is smoother below the axis than above. This is worth keeping in mind when setting listening height.
Beamwidth
Polar Plot
Apart from the unusually wide 5 kHz band, off-axis decay is smooth.
The seemingly perfect vertical polar is just an illusion — the ~3 kHz crossover point doesn’t appear in my polar plots.
THD
The woofer’s performance in the bass range isn’t outstanding. While 3-way designs have the potential to optimize each driver’s strengths, I don’t see much evidence of that here.
Odd-order distortion is less of a concern, but even-order components in the woofer range are higher than in the MR4’s 4-inch woofer. Since the woofer fires downward, gravity and suspension asymmetry could cause even-order distortion to change over time. Let’s hope the suspension is strong enough to resist mechanical aging.
Multitone Test
Here’s where the 3-way advantage shows. Some users might find this alone convincing.
80Hz~
There’s a noise component around 400–500 Hz at low output, but otherwise it holds up well.
Compression Test
If you don’t expect outstanding dynamics, the results are perfectly acceptable for the price.
Deviation between 2 samples
You can’t expect tight matching of three drivers and crossover parts at this price. The 4 kHz quirk seen earlier may be unique to the sample I measured, pointing to unit variation.
Final thoughts
I was curious about this speaker from the moment it was announced. A 3-way active speaker at this price was enough to catch my attention — especially from Edifier, the maker of the MR4.
Overall, I think it’s an impressive achievement, and simply bringing it to market without glaring faults deserves praise. But the more I examined its performance, the more the price made sense: from driver selection to design choices, it doesn’t feel like a product conceived from the ground up as a 3-way system.
