.PreSonus Eris E4.5 sure took many people by surprise. These speakers have shown to bring a number of qualities which rightfully make them one of the. Don’t let their appearance fool you. The Eris E4.5 speakers are all about business.DesignOn a first glance, Eris E4.5 look a bit underwhelming. If you were to put them next to a couple of pairs of your regular desktop speakers, they wouldn’t stand out too much. However, this low profile design makes E4.5 a perfect sleeper set.
PreSonus did everything right regardless if you like or dislike the aesthetics. They put all of the most used controls at the front of the active speaker, eliminating any need to reach behind on a daily basis.The back panel contains a number of controls and a well thought out I/O cluster. Build quality is more or less on point. Once you turn these puppies on, you won’t hear any rattling or cabinet vibrations even at higher volume. Overall, Eris E4.5 will fit into just about any studio interior design, but definitely won’t be the conversation piece in the room.FeaturesLooking at the features, there is a lot that needs to be mentioned. Let’s start things off by going over the drivers.
Up on top, there’s a 1″ super lightweight silk dome tweeter that promises to be pretty quick when you start pushing those highs. More importantly, there’s a 4.5″ low-frequency Kevlar cone right underneath it. Straight off the bat you know there’s some power behind these speakers. A quick glance at the back panel reveals more goodies.Acoustic tuning controls are something that you start seeing right around this price range. PreSonus has included Highs and Mids adjustment knobs, a Low Cutoff switch that allows you to anchor that bass at 100Hz if you wish to, and finally the Acoustic Space switch for easier positioning.
Combined, Eris E4.5 speakers pack some 50 Watts of power, making them fairly loud for their size. PerformanceHere’s where things go from good to incredible.
The response you’re looking at here is impressively flat. We are talking surprisingly good transparency across the range with variations measured within 2dB intervals. On top of that, E4.5 can go fairly deep if you need them to. Doing actual mixing with these is easy. The only users who will complain of inaccuracy are the seasoned veterans of the business who have honed both their skills and their ears.
However, Eris E4.5 wasn’t really meant for them.It was meant for beginners who want to get the good stuff right away. It takes some time to properly position the speakers and set them up for the size of your room. When you get done doing that, you will be impressed by what you are hearing out of these compact monitors.
PreSonus Eris E5 Active Studio Monitor ReviewWhen I hear Presonus I think of awesome preamps and digital mixers, so it was a nice surprise to hear that they’d entered the realm of studio monitors. This is quite a brave move from their part, as this is a market which is already flooded with entry level monitors, but time will tell how they fare against the competitors.The PreSonus Eris E5 studio monitors which I’m reviewing are not the smallest of the range, there are a set of bookshelf size 4.5 Eris monitors too but are probably the best suited to small bedroom size studio environments. If you need something with a little more ‘oomf’, there’s also the 8 inch Presonus E8. AnatomyI really like it when I look at the back panel of a monitor and I can understand what each knob and switch does without having to read the manual. So often the settings are so encrypted that you need to take out the manual and decipher the settings with fear of blowing the thing up. But PreSonus have taken a very pragmatic approach to the various switches and knobs, which is great.
Most monitors have an output gain knob, but the PreSonus Eris E5 has ‘input gain’ which allows you to control the level of the source coming in, rather than the level of the sound going out. This helps to attenuate any noise that may be coming from the signal source.
Tthe ‘Acoustic Space’ switch is great on the PreSonus Eris E5 as it compensates for different room environments. If you have your speakers setup against the wall at an angle towards you, you use setting A. If you have them pointing straight on, and close to the back wall, you use setting B. And lastly, if you have them straight on but away from the back wall, you use setting C.This is a clever feature, as it takes into account that not everyone buying the PreSonus Eris E5 monitors will have the best studio acoustics.The ‘Acoustic Tuning’ controls allow you to tweak the mid and high frequency response to your taste. The High control shelves all frequencies above 4.5 kHz with a 6dB cut/boost, while the Mid control is a parametric EQ that boosts or cuts frequencies centred on 1 kHz.
There’s also a ‘Low Cutoff’ three-way switch, which offers a roll off at 80Hz and 100Hz – useful if you want to add a sub to the system. There are also three input options: RCA, jack or XLR which is very useful if you’re going to be using different input sources.How do the PreSonus Eris E5 Monitors sound?Overall, I found that the Mids and Highs are very prominent on the PreSonus Eris E5, bordering on harsh perhaps, and I would’ve enjoyed a bit more presence in the low end they are 5 inch woofers! Ed.The PreSonus Eris E5 has plenty of volume on tap and when I cranked them loud the lows became easier to mix, and I was impressed with how tight the bass was even under high volumes. But I had to endure some pretty hectic mids and highs while mixing the lows and found that my ears took a bit of a hammering. I wasn’t expecting much bass response in entry level 5 inch monitors at low volume, but paired with my sub it was actually really nice to mix with, because I could turn the gain down a bit and still hear the low end.
Presonus Eris 5
I’m not used to mixing with such prominent mids and highs, but there were elements that I could pin-point easily in the higher frequencies that I normally wouldn’t have noticed on my current monitors so that was a definite positive, but my ears did become fatigued a lot quicker than usual. Click to enlarge image Who Should Get Them?Someone who doesn’t have the luxury of a treated studio environment, but wants to produce quality music in the room that they have. If you save up one day to get top end professional monitors as your production abilities develop you could always keep the PreSonus Eris E5 monitors as an excellent reference pair.