This is a review and detailed measurements of the KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 active studio monitor (speaker). It was kindly purchased new by a member and drop shipped to me. It costs US $176 each from Amazon including Prime shipping.
I think these yellow drivers look cute
:
Nice to see the cabinet sides curved to reduce diffraction. A small waveguide is provided another tweeter:
Given the small woofer, it is probably sufficient.
You can't see it here since the unit is not powered up but despite being a cheap black and white LCD, I was surprised at its usability (JBL, are you listening?):
There is an App that lets you pair with it and apply equalization. I did not test that. On that note, all measurements and listening tests were performed at factory setting.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of around 1%.
Measurement temperature was 63 degrees. Left the heater on overnight by accident. Probably cost me $5 in heating bill!
Reference axis was center of the tweeter.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
The on-axis may look a bit messy to the eye but really, if you zoom out a bit, it is more or less flat. We do have a port interference around 680 Hz which is common with front ports:
Back to spin graph, directivity is good. Tweeter has some ups and downs as we also see in the drive response.
Early window shows a drop in mid-range but also a droop in highs which is not bad a thing:
As noted, floor (and ceiling) reflection are the issue here so put some absorber there or keep that path length long.
Predicted in-room response in far field shows what we already know:
Beamwidth is surprisingly good:
This small woofer is mating well with that wave-guided tweeter. The sharp narrowing toward the end is probably not a bad thing to take away extra sharpness.
We see the same in our contour plot:
Vertical response is typical of these two-way speakers so stay at or slightly above tweeter axis to avoid the holes at 2 to 3 kHz:
Waterfall shows some resonances:
We see the prominent one around 680 Hz which we observed in spin graph just as well.
Distortion is quite good actually at 86 dBSPL, and horrible at 96, the latter of which I could hear during testing:
I am going to show the 96 dB graph in absolute form as I always do. Question: should I switch to using 86 dB in the future for smaller speakers? It will make it harder to then compare all speakers together.
KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 Speaker Listening Tests and EQ
I only needed 10 seconds of listening to my standard first reference track to know the sound was right. Very nice tonality which continued to deliver just the same through the rest of my tracks. I took a shot at correcting the resonance at 680 Hz:
I thought the effect was positive. Paradoxically, the sound became a bit warmer. Given the high "Q" of the correction, I don't trust my ears fully to be correct in this regard so do your own testing.
Once there, I could not stop listening to the ROKIT 5! I played track after track while preparing this review.
Pushing the volume up caused the woofer to gradually get distorted. Distortion level would then scale with volume which I prefer to speakers that play and all of a sudden break up badly. Despite only testing one speaker, I could get reasonable loudness so a pair should be very much sufficient in workstation/desktop environment.
There is almost no hiss coming out of the tweeter! I could barely hear it at 1 inch. Past that my PC noise would dwarf it. I expect noise to be a non-issue.
Conclusion
I don't know why but I went into this review thinking this speaker would not do well. But it did, both objectively (if you zoom out a bit) and subjectively. Despite its budget price, it delivers.
Overall, I am happy to recommend the KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 monitor. If it could handle more power and was a bit cleaner, I would rate it even a step higher!
Edit: Video review posted to youtube:
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I think these yellow drivers look cute
:Nice to see the cabinet sides curved to reduce diffraction. A small waveguide is provided another tweeter:
Given the small woofer, it is probably sufficient.
You can't see it here since the unit is not powered up but despite being a cheap black and white LCD, I was surprised at its usability (JBL, are you listening?):
There is an App that lets you pair with it and apply equalization. I did not test that. On that note, all measurements and listening tests were performed at factory setting.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of around 1%.
Measurement temperature was 63 degrees. Left the heater on overnight by accident. Probably cost me $5 in heating bill!
Reference axis was center of the tweeter.
Measurements are compliant with latest speaker research into what can predict the speaker preference and is standardized in CEA/CTA-2034 ANSI specifications. Likewise listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.
KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
The on-axis may look a bit messy to the eye but really, if you zoom out a bit, it is more or less flat. We do have a port interference around 680 Hz which is common with front ports:
Back to spin graph, directivity is good. Tweeter has some ups and downs as we also see in the drive response.
Early window shows a drop in mid-range but also a droop in highs which is not bad a thing:
As noted, floor (and ceiling) reflection are the issue here so put some absorber there or keep that path length long.
Predicted in-room response in far field shows what we already know:
Beamwidth is surprisingly good:
This small woofer is mating well with that wave-guided tweeter. The sharp narrowing toward the end is probably not a bad thing to take away extra sharpness.
We see the same in our contour plot:
Vertical response is typical of these two-way speakers so stay at or slightly above tweeter axis to avoid the holes at 2 to 3 kHz:
Waterfall shows some resonances:
We see the prominent one around 680 Hz which we observed in spin graph just as well.
Distortion is quite good actually at 86 dBSPL, and horrible at 96, the latter of which I could hear during testing:
I am going to show the 96 dB graph in absolute form as I always do. Question: should I switch to using 86 dB in the future for smaller speakers? It will make it harder to then compare all speakers together.
KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 Speaker Listening Tests and EQ
I only needed 10 seconds of listening to my standard first reference track to know the sound was right. Very nice tonality which continued to deliver just the same through the rest of my tracks. I took a shot at correcting the resonance at 680 Hz:
I thought the effect was positive. Paradoxically, the sound became a bit warmer. Given the high "Q" of the correction, I don't trust my ears fully to be correct in this regard so do your own testing.
Once there, I could not stop listening to the ROKIT 5! I played track after track while preparing this review.
Pushing the volume up caused the woofer to gradually get distorted. Distortion level would then scale with volume which I prefer to speakers that play and all of a sudden break up badly. Despite only testing one speaker, I could get reasonable loudness so a pair should be very much sufficient in workstation/desktop environment.
There is almost no hiss coming out of the tweeter! I could barely hear it at 1 inch. Past that my PC noise would dwarf it. I expect noise to be a non-issue.
Conclusion
I don't know why but I went into this review thinking this speaker would not do well. But it did, both objectively (if you zoom out a bit) and subjectively. Despite its budget price, it delivers.
Overall, I am happy to recommend the KRK ROKIT 5 Gen 4 monitor. If it could handle more power and was a bit cleaner, I would rate it even a step higher!
Edit: Video review posted to youtube:
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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