Mackie CR5-XBT Gaming & Studio Monitor Review
Introduction
Whenever it comes time to get some quality audio from your system, it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come in a few short years. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that the majority of audio solutions were tiny plastic speakers with all the depth of a puddle and broad range of a knife edge.
If, like us, you were fortunate enough to own a good HiFi back in the day then there might have been times when you plugged the RCA jacks of your console into it to get quality audio, and got a glimpse of what was possible. PCs took much longer to catch up with that concept, and there clearly is a place for high quality audio, particularly with so much digital media floating around.
Recently we looked at a couple of speaker sets; the Mackie CR8-XBT, the big brother of today’s review, which had the kind of glorious audio one would expect to get from an audio specialist; and the NZXT Relay, a more affordable option sitting very much in the kind of niche that has become familiar to anyone who has sought out a set of gaming speakers.
The price of the NZXT ones and their relatively ‘only okay’ performance had us wondering if our other most recently reviewed manufacturer, Mackie, had a set of speakers which were more affordable, and yet didn’t compromise the quality to attain that low price tag. We’ve already seen, or rather heard, how brilliant their CR8-XBT speakers were, so with the CR5-XBT available for a eye-openingly low price, we just knew we had to test them out and see how near they got to their bigger brother. Bigger in the literal sense as the number in the model name of the Mackie range refers to the size of the main speaker. Going from 8 inches to 5 inches is a fair drop, but then £109 is a crazy low price too. Crazy because they have been dropped by £100 in the last month…. How do they fair?
Technical Specifications
 Â
