Buchardt · Bookshelf

E50-S

Product description
Not an upgrade over the E50 but a fork in the road: the S stands for sensitivity. The cabinet is a centimetre wider to take a bigger woofer — a custom 7.5-inch Satori in TeXtreme, the woven carbon fabric Oxeon makes in Sweden — in place of the E50's 6.5-inch Purifi, and the crossover is third-order Butterworth with no resistors in it at all. The trade is explicit and Buchardt states it plainly: less bass (38 Hz against 29) in exchange for four more decibels, which is what turns a speaker that demanded a powerful amplifier into one that will work off a 15-watt tube amp. The midrange comes forward, the treble tuning stays. They also decided not to publish measurements for this one, having published them for the E50 — their words are that it is tuned by ear, carries a deeper BBC dip, and is the less frequency-linear of the two on purpose. €4,300 a pair, shipping and duties included.

Performance — where it sits in the catalog

BassTrebleSensitivityEasy loadCone area
Bass reachTreble reachSensitivityEasy loadCone area
E50-S38 Hz22 kHz88 dB4 Ω288 cm²
Median45 Hz25 kHz87 dB6 Ω219 cm²
How to read this chart

Each axis spans the range the 452 bookshelves in the catalog actually cover, so equal distance means equal difference — and for cone area and the two frequencies, which are read as ratios, equal distance means equal ratio. The dashed inner ring is where the scale starts, not zero. Ranked within a class because a bookshelf measured against floorstanders is feeble on every axis for the single reason that it is a bookshelf. Cone area is summed from the drive units — no maker publishes it. Bass and treble reach are quoted to different tolerances and only 56% of the catalog says which, so read those two axes as approximate. The grey outline is the median of this speaker's own class, the 380 passive bookshelves — same type, same side of the active/passive line, which matters because the two halves are not the same product: the median active bookshelf carries 155 cm² of cone against the passive median's 219. Median rather than mean, because a handful of very large cabinets would drag a mean above most of the class it claims to describe.

Units
TypeBookshelf
HiFi ladder position#294 of 452 bookshelf
PowerPassive
Height395 mm
Width200 mm
Depth284 mm
Footprint568 cm²
Space taken22.4 L
Weight9 kg
EnclosurePassive radiator
Drivers1× 25 mm tweeter (Scan-Speak textile dome), 1× 190 mm mid-bass (Satori TeXtreme cone)
Crossover frequency2000 Hz
Frequency response38–22000 Hz
Sensitivity88 dB
Impedance4 Ω
Where to buyCheck availability ↗
Manufacturerbuchardtaudio.com ↗
Product pageOpen product page ↗

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