Producing music means relying on tools which offer you the best possible performance and the closest sound to the original, live instrument. This often means that equipment becomes very expensive, very fast. It doesn’t have to be this way, though, as evidenced by the Edifier MR3 compact studio monitor speakers. These are small speakers with a 3.5″ woofer, meant for home studios as well as music enthusiasts who want a flat, faithful frequency response without breaking the bank.
Disclaimer: Edifier kindly provided this unit for testing. The MR3 system sells for $149.99 in the US, and £89.99 in the UK. Additional information on the official website.
TL;DR: recap
| Pros |
Cons |
| + Well-built with a modern design
+ Good connectivity options + Fantastic transient response + Great detail + No hiss! + Excellent value |
– Some sibilance
– Treble can be a bit aggressive at times – Volume level is reset at every power cycle – The companion app could do with a redesign |
Rating: 8/10
Packaging & Accessories
The MR3 come padded in cardboard in a relatively small box. The accessories include all the cables you need: power, speaker cable to connect the two channels, RCA to 3.5 mm jack, and 3.5 mm jack to 3.5 mm jack. There is also a quick-start guide.
Design & Build
The first thing I noticed about the Edifier MR3 is that they are very small. The active speaker is just 125.5 x 220 x 160 mm (plus a bit more for the connectors), which is small enough that “pint-sized” is almost literal. This is also thanks to the fact that the woofers are small, at 3.5″; they’re paired with 1″ silk dome tweeters. The cabinets are made of MDF, while the front is made of plastic; they come in both black and white, and in both cases the cones sport a copper dust cap. The copper colour is also found on the volume knob.
The front is shaped to improve sound performance; the wave guide around the tweeter helps directionality both vertically and horizontally. There are no grilles to cover the drivers and, as the front is slightly curved, it is not possible to install a covering mesh either. The woofer cone appears to be made of carbon fibre, but I asked Edifier and they told me it is made of polypropilene.
The front of the right hand side speaker also hosts two 3.5 mm jack sockets: one is for the headphone output, while the other is for the aux input. This gives you flexibility in case you want to connect another source directly without messing with the cables on the back.
Speaking of the back, it features stereo RCA connectors, two 6.3 mm TRS jacks, a button to enable Bluetooth pairing, two knobs to control bass and treble, the speaker cable connector (to connect the left hand side speaker) and the power connector. As the Edifier MR3 are meant for monitoring, they don’t have fancy inputs like HDMI or optical; they are meant to be connected to a DAC or an audio interface.
Build quality is overall high, especially given the price these are sold at. The materials appear very solid and the construction itself is sturdy, too.
Features & Specs
As many audio interfaces feature balanced output to reduce noise, the Edifier MR3 offer the option to take advantage of this, too, in the form of the two 6.3 TRS jacks for balanced input. That’s very common in the pro audio world and it’s easy to take advantage of in the audiophile world, too, thanks to the wide availability of DACs with stereo XLR outputs (or even 6.3 mm outputs, like on the SMSL C200 Pro). The presence of the RCA connectors allows you to use the MR3 with virtually anything else, from computers to TVs, and makes the speakers very flexible.
Edifier MR3 |
| Frequency response | 52 – 40,000 Hz |
| Inputs | RCA, 6.3 mm TRS jack |
| Power output | 18 W (per speaker) |
The Edifier MR3 feature an amplifier capable of delivering 18 W per channel. This is enough to push the drivers up to 90 dB and over, and therefore to high volume levels.
By pressing the volume knob you can switch between the music and monitor modes; the difference is that the monitor mode is meant to be totally flat, whereas the music mode uses Edifier’s equalisation and the company says that it is “ideal for everyday music listening”.
While most traditional monitors employ switches on the back to adjust things like the placement, the Edifier MR3 use the company’s ConneX application to do so. You have to connect to the speakers with your smartphone in order to be able to make those adjustments. The application can be a bit confusing in the way it is designed and worded, as an example because the “acoustic tuning” section is a small button that is easy to miss rather than its own category, but it is overall simple enough that it is easy to figure it out. It offers access to an equaliser, to acoustic tuning settings and to firmware update, as well as settings like tones being played when you connect to the speakers with Bluetooth.
The acoustic tuning settings include low cutoff, which allows you to select both the cutoff frequency (between 20 Hz and 100 Hz) and the slope (from -6 dB/octave to -24 dB/octave), the acoustic space tuning, which reduces bass up to -4dB, and desktop placement tuning, as using the speakers on a desk can increase certain frequencies due to reflections.
The equaliser is quite limited in that it only offers six bands: 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 Khz, 4 kHz and 8 kHz. A more granular setup would be ideal, especially given the speakers are meant to be used as monitors. This is especially relevant given the presence of peaks in the treble section beyond 8 kHz, as we’ll see in the next section.
One thing I personally don’t like about the Edifier MR3 is the fact that the volume level is not remembered when you turn the unit off and back on again if the volume is below 6 or above 24. This means that you will need to increase or decrease the volume to your preferred level every time you turn on the speakers, which is very inconvenient. While this can be at least partially circumvented by adjusting the volume on the audio interface, I spoke to Edifier who confirmed that they will update the firmware to make it so that the speakers remember the volume you set, as it’s simply more convenient.
Sound
I tested the Edifier MR3 by connecting them to an SMSL PS200 DAC, which in turn was connected to my computer. The monitors were placed on desktop mounts.
The controls in the app allow you to change the sound based on placement; given that the MR3 have a rear-firing bass reflex, you should use the app to reduce bass based on how close the wall is. I found, however, that they sound just fine without any intervention even when they are just 15 cm away from the wall; reducing bass by even just 2 dB makes it too weak. I have also found that enabling the “desktop control” option leads to clearer mids, but it removes most bass. Your mileage may vary and you should experiment with what works in your environment.
Contrary to many other powered speakers I have tried, the MR3 have basically no self-noise; I can’t hear anything even with my ear directly next to the speaker. Great job, Edifier!
Soundstage is relatively small, with limited width and depth; the sound never appears to come from beyond the speakers themselves and you can always hear clearly that it comes from them. This is partially due to imaging, which often gives a general idea of the instrument’s placement, but without pinpoint accuracy: instruments do not appear perfectly in the centre, as an example, but in a vague central area which is quite wide. Instrument separation, on the other hand, is excellent, especially given the price: you can (nearly) always follow every individual instruments, even in complex and layered tracks.
Bass is almost perfectly neutral, meaning that it is often almost reserved. Given the small size of the speakers, it is not surprising that the frequency response experiences a cliff below 50 Hz and that there is virtually no sub-bass; although you can configure this in the settings through the app, the slope is always quite steep even when configured to extend depth as much as possible. This means that tracks like AES DANA’s Inks will sound less deep and impactful than they could, but overall the MR3 will cover the vast majority of cases with ease. The following track in the album, Unfold, showcases very well the speed of the MR3: the transients are all very fast and the beat is almost physical despite the small size of the speakers and the cones. What is even more impressive is how quick and “dry” (in a good sense!) the beats are; there’s none of the sensation of “wetness” that normally is there in low-end speakers, which makes it so that beats feel like they are hitting something wet that drags on the sounds. As a consequence, detail is also relatively high, with very decent layering.
The mids are linear and therefore well balanced, with just a bit of emphasis on the middle and then the upper area. This means that most tracks will sound great and offer a faithful reproduction with little colouring, with no preference for genre or instrument. As mids are in line with bass, you will hear all instruments with the correct placement in the mix. The two bumps in the middle and upper regions are overall minor and they cause just a little sibilance, but they can occasionally sound quite intense: as an example, in Enya’s Shepherd Moons, the chorus voices at the beginning sound almost aggressive. Just like with bass, transients are very fast and almost physical: Rodrigo y Gabriela’s Diablo Rojo is a great example of this, as the thumping on the guitar sounds immediate and very faithful to the real thing. The level of detail is very high in all cases, to the point you can hear micro-details with ease.
Treble is overall relatively neutral and linear, although it exhibits an emphasis in the middle area between 9 and 12 kHz. Although this is an overall minor bump, it can make cymbals sound quite aggressive in some tracks (as an example, in the first half of Snarky Puppy’s Take it!) and, more generally, it will give treble more presence in the mix. This is something to keep in mind when using the MR3 for audio production. There is very good extension, and the upper area lends a good amount of air to the sound. This is all complemented by a fantastic level of detail, above what you’d expect from speakers in the sub-$150 range: cymbals almost always shine and shimmer with micro-details.
Final Thoughts
I am really surprised and impressed by the Edifier MR3. They’re fantastic little speakers, a testament to how much technology has evolved over the last few years. Despite their small size, they’re able to offer relatively deep bass and a good maximum volume with low distortion. Although they are in the low end of the market, they still offer surprisingly good performance for both music production and consumption: the relatively flat and neutral sound signature lends itself to all genres and all sorts of applications, from monitoring a mix to watching TV to blasting out tunes. One thing that really surprised me is that the MR3 offer great technicalities, chief among them the speed of transients which makes listening to music a real pleasure.
Long story short, if you want a competent pair of powered speakers for less than $200, you don’t need to look any further than the MR3. They’re simply fantastic whatever you want to do with them. They might not be able to replace bigger designs like the Yamaha HS5, but they are perfectly good in a variety of scenarios – as monitors for a home studio, as PC speakers, as speakers for a TV.
