Recording - May 2013 - 22

PreSonus Eris Series

oddnesses that happen in the low mids,
most commonly the reinforcement you get
from audio bouncing up to your ears from
your mixing desk. If you feel you need
more than a dB or two of correction, you
should probably double-check other parts
of your listening chain, or the room itself,
as a very large boost or cut that’s set within the speakers is applying a bandage to
a much larger problem.
The Acoustic Space switch is a low shelving control that can either be set flat or to 2
or 4 dB of attenuation with a corner frequency of 800 Hz. This switch is specifically designed for situations where you
can’t place the speakers sufficiently far
away from walls or corners to prevent bass
buildup; ideally the –2 dB setting would
work for speakers near a back wall, and
the –4 dB setting would help compensate in
situations where the speakers need to be
set in the corners of a room.
The last switch, Low Cutoff, allows you to
engage a 12 dB/octave highpass filter with
a corner frequency of 80 or 100 Hz. This is
specifically intended to allow the Eris speakers to work with a separate subwoofer, if
you feel your monitoring situation needs the
stronger extended bass of a sub; our listening sessions were based entirely on listening
to the Eris speakers by themselves.
Speaking of listening sessions, we set up
the two Eris speakers under very different
sets of conditions, based on their likely
areas of use. The E5 monitors were tested
in a desktop-audio setup with IsoAcoustics
ISO-L8R155 isolation stands on conventional shelves, as one might use when working with a DAW in a home studio. The E8
speakers were mounted on speaker stands
in the listening/mix room at Music Maker
Publications, which is treated with GIK
Acoustics paneling to control reflections at
the listening position. In both cases, the
speakers were set up as closely as possible to an equilateral triangle with the
tweeters level with our ears—4 feet on a
side for the E5 monitors and more like 6
feet on a side for the E8 speakers.
Per PreSonus’s advice, we did not burn in
either set of speakers before beginning our
critical listening; our first impressions came
(literally) straight out of the box. As usual,
our listening materials included well-known
and very simply recorded rock, jazz,
acoustic singer/songwriter pop featuring
guitar and piano, and classical music, with
excursions into world music, electronica of
various sorts, and of course the infamous
mistakes and missteps of albums we’d
recorded in comparatively primitive recording setups in the 1980s and 1990s.
22

RECORDING May 2013

Listening to the E5
Our first impression upon firing up the
E5 was, “Whoa, that’s loud!” Our second impression was, “Whoa, that’s kinda
harsh.” Our third impression was, “Ah...
when in doubt, make sure you’ve set your
input levels properly!”
These little speakers are very efficient
and get loud pretty quickly, but they have
a convincing way to keep you listening at
safe/sane levels; while they’re rated to
102 dB peak SPL at 1 meter, the woofers
start to sound brittle and unpleasant when
you get close to that level. Our ideal “loud
listening” level for the E5 was a much
more reasonable 85 to 90 dBA SPL at the
listening position, and for most styles of
music we got great results in the very earfriendly range of 75 to 80 dBA SPL.

We tweaked the controls around a bit
and determined that the High and Mid eq
can in fact get really extreme if overused;
we ended up setting them Flat for the serious listening. Our listening setup was
rather close to a rear wall, and in our initial listening we went back and forth
between having the Acoustic Space control set to Flat or to –2 dB. In the end, we
felt that the bass we were getting when the
Acoustic Space control was set Flat wasn’t
overhyped or thumpy, so we left the control
there. We didn’t use the Low Cut at all,
since our system doesn’t include or need a
subwoofer; if you’re keeping score, that
means our reported results were all from
having the adjustment controls set flat (and
the Input Gain set to unity as well).
Starting at the bottom, the one place
where the laws of physics will get you
every time is in a small woofer’s ability
to reproduce bass accurately; the E5’s
low end of 53 Hz is usable but you’ll
have to check your results on larger
speakers before you consider your
mixes “done”. The rolloff in the bass
was polite and smooth, and there was
a lot of thump in kick drums and solid
harmonic structure in bass guitars and
low piano notes, even if the very lowest
fundamentals couldn’t be heard fully.
Mids were forward and rockin’, with
vocals and guitars prominent and
detailed; on acoustic tracks, details like
finger squeaks on strings and breaths for
phrasing were clear and evident. I didn’t notice any radical jumps in level or
character around the crossover point.
Highs were extended and smooth, without any edgy spikiness or resonances
that leaped out; finger cymbals and hihats were clear and bright, and when an
Recording - May 2013

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