Things that sound wrong when pronounced right.

it says /e/

Always happy to reciprocate.

æəɜðŋ oh, good, I've found a way to type IPA symbols .
Not significant enough, David.
The video is of a native Spanish speaker pronouncing Spanish "e", which is phonetically /e/, which does not sound like the "e" in "bet", which would have been what looks like a backward 3, except I hit the wrong key when I was testing out if the IPA symbols would transfer to a2k.

There are actually more than a dozen vowel sounds in English, while we only have five letters to represent them, and then we tend to diphthongize them, so "long" English "a" is actually phonetically more like /ei/, and Spanish "e" is phonetically mostly /e/, which is pretty much English "a" without the "ee" (=/i/ in IPA part. In some contexts Spanish "e" can drift a bit toward the backward 3, which dammit I didn't type, which is like the English "e" in "bet" and is adjacent to /e/ if you look at a chart of where and how vowels are produced in the moutn, but phoneticians mostly seem to agree that Spanish "e' is /e/, which is to repeat, like the first half of English long "A".

Try looking at "Spanish phonology" and "IPA" in Wikipedia, David. You don't give the impression of actually knowing much about phonetics. And keep in mind that there are a number of Spanish accents, differing both by country and often by regions or ethnic groups within countries, and the people I've known make merciless fun of other accents (including Spanish Spanish, which seems to sound kind of effete and affected to Western Hemisphere ears, from what people have told me), so whatever people have told you may be only applicable to a particular part of the whole family of Spanishes.

In some contexts Spanish "e" can drift a bit toward the backward 3. . .

The somewhat slangy term for a dollar is NOT pronounced "pess-oh", trust me on this.

The Spanish vowel e has a sound that can vary depending on its location in a word. Its pronunciation also varies somewhat among various regions and even with individual speakers.

The most common sound for e is much like the English "e" sound in word such as "test" and "wrench." This sound is especially common when the e is located between two consonants.

Sometimes, the e is similar to the vowel sound in English words such as "say" - but shorter. Some explanation is in order here. If you listen carefully, you may notice that for many English speakers the vowel sound in "say" is made up of two sounds - there's an "eh" sound that glides into an "ee" sound, so the word is pronounced something like "seh-ee." When pronouncing the Spanish e, only the "eh" sound is used - there's no glide into an "ee" sound. (In fact, if you pronounce the glide, it becomes the Spanish diphthong ei rather than e. As one native speaker using the nickname Didi explained recently in our forum: "As a native I'd say that the most accurate pronunciation for that e sound is like that in 'bet' or 'met.' The sound of 'ace' has an extra vowel sound that makes it unsuitable."

The variable nature of the e sound also was explained well in this forum post by Mim100: The simple vowel e can be rendered anywhere across a range of tongue heights, from roughly mid-low (or mid-open), resembling what you hear as 'por-KEH,' to mid-high (or mid-closed), resembling what you hear as 'por-KAY.' The key feature of the simple vowel e is that it is pronounced somewhere within that range of tongue height and that the tongue does not change height or shape during the course of pronouncing the vowel. Standard Spanish does not distinguish between words based on how open or closed the vowel e happens to be pronounced. You may hear a more open pronunciation more often in closed syllables (syllables that end in a consonant), and you may hear a more closed pronunciation more often in open syllables (syllables that end in a vowel)."

David, you've got it backward--what English spells A (long A, not short) is a somewhat dipthongized version of what Spanish and phoneticians and the rest of the world spell /e/, which is the essentially universal phonetic symbol for the sound And my experience with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans is not yours.

The somewhat slangy term for a dollar is NOT pronounced "pess-oh", trust me on this.

Have you inadvertently hit one of the several virtual (not physical)"mute" buttons that can appear from time to time, or turned the volume control down on your speaker (usually on the toolbar)? If your computer has a separate headphone jack, or a headphone jack on the sound card, you can get stereo speakers at a computer store for under diez pesos (or quite a bit more, depending on the speakers).

David, see my post before yours, which I was editing to add emphasis while you were posting apparently. It bears directly on the question. You seem to have dealt with people who pronounce it more toward the /ɛ/ in contexts where it varies. I've had more contact with the /e/ end of the pronunciation spectrum. You live in NYC. Go ask a Spanish speaker on the street how they pronounce "peso". I think you'll be surprised.

David, I keep telling you that it's not "payso", which is /peiso/ phonetically but /peso/ without the diphthong, and /e/ phonetically is like a sound that in English is written "a".

Get your poor downtrodden peons on the job, if you can't do it yourself, hook up the speakers, and report back.

Anyway, why can't there be more than one way to pronounce something in every language? The regional pronunciations within even a city can range widely so it stands to reason different countries have different pronunciations and there is no right or wrong.

You're making me laugh, David, being so stuck on how to 'correctly'
pronounce /e/ when you spell fonetically and only selectively at that.