When mixing music you want a pair of studio monitors that will accurately reveal the truth about what you're listening to, and the Eris series from PreSonus are designed to do just that. With its 5" Kevlar low-frequency transducer, the compact Eris E5 sports a 45W, Class-AB amplifier; and a 1" (25 mm), silk-dome tweeter powered by a 35W, Class-AB amplifier. It can crank out a clean 102dB SPL, peak. Frequency response is rated at 53Hz to 22kHz. For a studio monitor in its size and price class, that's impressive. Thanks to well-designed Kevlar low-frequency transducers, low-mass silk-dome tweeters, responsive Class-AB amplification, and professional acoustic-adjustment controls, Eris delivers the goods.

Both Eris models provide balanced XLR, balanced 1/4" TRS, and unbalanced RCA line-level inputs. When both balanced connections are in use, the TRS input will supersede the XLR input. The RCA input is summed into the signal path. With this selection, you'll have no problem hooking your Eris speakers up with virtually any line-level source. (If your signal source has unbalanced, 1/4" TS outputs, simply use a 1/4"-to-RCA adapter or adapter cable.)

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 E5/E8 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 E5 or E8 with a subwoofer.

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.