Recording - May 2013 - 20

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

PreSonus has gotten into the speaker game, and its first models to
market are the Eris Series. Why “Eris”? No clue. Eris was the Greek
goddess of chaos (she helped start the Trojan War, but that’s another
story); her name’s been attached to the anarchist Erisians from the
famous Illuminatus! novels, and to the distant dwarf planet Eris that
circles our sun every 557 years. But studio monitors?
There’s nothing particularly chaotic about the new Eris speakers...
in fact, PreSonus’ first studio monitors present very neat solutions to
the problem of affordable, good-sounding monitoring for small studios. We got to work with both new Eris models for some extended
listening sessions, and here’s what we learned.
In common and different
The two Eris models are the E5 and E8. Both are biamplified 2-way
speakers in front-ported cabinets of vinyl-laminated MDF, with silk
dome tweeters and long-throw woven Kevlar woofers in a nicely
curved fascia with tweeter waveguide.

PreSonus
Eris Series High-Definition Studio Monitors
A new name for two impressive new entries in the active-speaker market
The E5 has a 1" tweeter and 5.25" woofer, with a 35W high-frequency amplifier, a 45W low-frequency amplifier, and a 3 kHz crossover
frequency. It claims a frequency response (no ±dB tolerances given) of 53
Hz to 22 kHz. The E8 has a 1.25" tweeter and an 8" woofer with a 65W
high-frequency amp, a 75W low-frequency amp, and a 2.2 kHz
crossover frequency. Its rated frequency response is 35 Hz to 22 kHz.
Both offer a variety of audio tweaks on the rear panel, letting the
user customize the speakers’ sound for best results in a variety of
placements. Inputs are on unbalanced RCA, balanced 1/4" TRS, and
XLR. There are center-detented controls for Input Gain, High and Mid
frequency tuning, and switches for Low Cutoff and Acoustic Space
adjustment. Power is via standard IEC cable, and the rear-panel
power switch is complemented by a bright blue front-fascia LED sporting the PreSonus logo.
Tuning for the space
The E5 is small enough to be used on a computer desktop, while
the E8 is better suited to mounting on stands, and both offer useful
tweaks to better match the speakers to your room. With the exception
of the Low Cutoff, all the provided controls are intended to help you
correct for specific, common problems with room acoustics.
The High eq is a shelving band with ±6 dB of boost/cut and a corner
frequency at 4.5 kHz, and the Mid eq is a broad (roughly two octaves,
according the manual) peaking eq with a center frequency of 1 kHz and
±6 dB of boost/cut. I recommend using these eq controls with great caution; they offer a wide range of tonal tweaks that are very musical to the
ears—that makes them tempting to play with in order to get your speakers to sound “good”, when what you actually want is accuracy.
The High shelf acts as a “tilt” control to mellow or sharpen the high
end of what you’re hearing; it’s best used very subtly in situations where
a room has partial acoustic treatment like foam panels, which tend to
preferentially damp the high end. The Mid eq lets you compensate for
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RECORDING May 2013

Recording - May 2013

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