PreSonus Eris E4.5 Powered Studio Monitor Speakers

When you're ready to get serious about recording, it's time to step up to PreSonus Eris-series studio monitors. Cheap computer speakers and home-stereo speakers won't reveal the truth about your mix. They aren't designed for that.

In contrast, Eris speakers are real studio monitors, delivering a very accurate response with a tight bass and very clear upper end. That's what you need in a home studio.

Indeed, thanks to well-designed Kevlar low frequency transducers, low-mass silk-dome tweeters, responsive Class AB amplification, and professional acoustic-adjustment controls, all Eris models deliver the goods.

Yet Eris-series speakers are ultra-affordable, making them a terrific value. And with two models, you can easily find the Eris monitor that best suits your studio needs.

When Size Matters
If space is at a premium, or if you want the ultimate in portability, consider the ultra-compact Eris E4.5. It may be the size of a computer speaker, but this mighty mite delivers professional audio quality, thanks to a 4.5-inch, Kevlar low-frequency driver; a low-mass, 1 inch, silk-dome tweeter with protective grille; and Class AB amplification. Each speaker is powered by a 25W Class AB amplifier - plenty of juice for a small speaker. The E4.5 ranges from 70 Hz up to 20 kHz, and at 6.42 x 9.45 x 7.09 inches (163 x 241 x 180 mm), you can shoehorn this little beauty into almost any studio space.

All Eris speakers have front-ported enclosures made of vinyl-laminated, medium-density fiberboard (MDF).

Gazintas
The E4.5 has balanced 1/4" TRS and unbalanced RCA inputs, as well as unbalanced 1/8" inputs for your smartphone or MP3 player, giving you all the flexibility you need when replacing computer speakers or those old studio monitors that have misled your ears for the last time.

Take a moment, if you will, to consider the E4.5's balanced TRS inputs; balanced inputs help you minimize noise - a pro feature you won't find on competing speakers in this class. That's not the only professional-class feature you get with Eris speakers that competitors can't match, though. Next, we'll discuss some higher-end features that truly set Eris apart from other budget-priced studio monitors.

You're in control!
Today's music producers deal with a wide variety of musical genres and often work in more than one location. It's easy to take your Eris speakers with you when you want to work in a different space. It's almost as easy to customize their sound for your room and type of music.

The most basic control is the Input Gain, which determines the signal level before it reaches the power amp. This is part of gain-staging your overall system - that is, setting the levels for every part of the recording chain in order to get the optimal level of clean audio all the way through. Once you've gain-staged your system, you can leave this control alone.

The Eris E4.5 provides three EQ controls in its Acoustic Tuning section: High, Mid, and Low Cutoff. These controls enable you to fine-tune the monitors and even to broadly approximate the sounds of different types of speakers so you can hear what your mix might sound like, for instance, on a car stereo or portable radio. The Low control also is useful when using the E4.5 with a subwoofer.

In addition to the Acoustic Tuning controls, Eris speakers offer a three-position Acoustic Space switch. This switch controls a second-order, low shelving filter that cuts the level of all frequencies below 800 Hz by a specified amount (-2 or -4 dB) to compensate for the boundary bass boost that occurs when the monitor is placed near a wall or corner. If you don't want to roll off those lows, set it to 0 dB.

This combination of controls lets you create a linear response for accurate monitoring and enables you to simulate different listening environments, so you don't have to listen to mixes on your car, consumer computer speakers, and home stereo to check how the music sounds with different systems. Instead, you can adjust the Eris monitors' response and test your mixes without leaving your studio. No other monitors in this price class offer this degree of control.

Safety Matters
Any loudspeaker is subject to an assortment of environmental and performance problems, and Eris monitors offer protection from most common of these. RF shielding protects against radio frequencies that could be induced into the signal and become audible. (If you've ever heard a radio broadcast unexpectedly coming out of a guitar amp, that's the result of RF interference.)

Eris monitors also provide over-temperature protection to avoid heat-related issues, current-output limiting (to prevent damage should there be a short circuit on the speaker terminals), and subsonic protection to filter out extremely low-frequency vibrations that could interfere with the woofer's performance.

Finally, Eris' power amplifiers have a "soft startup" so that you don't get damaging pops in the speakers when you power them up.

Sound Thinking
By now, it should be clear that Eris-series speakers deliver a lot more than you would expect from a budget-priced studio monitors. As you expect from PreSonus, Eris speakers use quality components, are well constructed, and deliver professional audio quality. They're lightweight and compact and look as professional as they sound. But what really sets them apart from comparably priced systems are user controls that allow you to tailor the speakers' response to your needs.