So I picked up some new studio monitors for my little home studio.  I was at the music store this week and saw a set of Yamaha MSP5’s and just had to grab a pair.  First thing I noticed was that these things are heavy!  They feel like they have some killer magnets, a nice solid wood case, and a descent amp in them to make them feel really solid.  They are self powered which is good cause I would hate to have a noisy power amp in the rack and worry about any ground loop issues and I know that the amps will match the speakers well.

These speakers also have two large bass reflex ports on them.  I did crank them up with some thumping music and was blown away by the amount of air produced by these little 5” mids.

They have a fairly flat frequency response.  But they do drop off around 50hz so I’ve paired them with a RCA consumer grade 8” sub.  I have the sub set to pick up the low end at 60hz to round out the sound.  According to my Phonic PAA3 sound meter they are fairly close to completely flat from top to bottom.  I am looking to get a 2X15 EQ from Peavey and run each channel though it to totally flatten them like a 18 wheeler on a squirrel.

The power for these speakers is being provided by a Furrman power conditioner and are being fed signal from my sound board with XLR cables to get a nice balanced signal.  There is some low level noise coming out of my board but that is no fault of the monitors, I never even noticed it with my Klipsch 2.1’s (Promedia series).

Over all I’m very impressed with the performance of these little speakers They have a very bright high end.  I’m very impressed at the precision of the mids on these babies, I hear a lot of speakers that totally get the mid range wrong (usually just being really harsh almost to the point of over modulation).  The low end is slightly lacking by themselves but you can’t expect a ton from 5” drivers, so of course you’ll want to add a separate sub to make up the bottom end.

Overall if you need a good set of budget speakers you could totally go with these and be very happy.  If you need something a little more responsive on the low end and don’t wanna add a sub give the MSP7’s a try.

Well worth the $250/speaker price tag.  Let me know what you think of yours in the comments.