2 weeks Ago
PreSonus is an audio brand that’s been bubbling around in the home recording market for 30 years and has its roots in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Founded in a garage by Jim Odom, a musician and recording engineer, and Brian Smith, an electrical engineer, the company initially concentrated on making affordable and high-quality audio equipment for musicians and audio professionals. Since 2021, PreSonus has been part of the mighty Fender Group , an American company that’s imbued with the magic of the music industry and founded by Leo Fender back in 1946 from Fullerton, California.
Fender is inextricably linked with guitar models like Stratocaster and Telecaster. It now owns brands like Gretsch, Bigsby and Squier. PreSonus Audio Electronics now produces a range of professional studio equipment, recording software, the kind of smaller equipment used in home studios as well as professional recording studios for mixing and balancing music.
With the boom in home recording that was spurred on by the pandemic, coupled with the affordability of home recording technology, the market for studio monitors has boomed in the past few years. PreSonus has joined in with the studio monitor market in a big way producing budget speakers as well as more professional equipment aimed at high-end home studios. The new Eris Pro 6 studio monitors sit in the middle of PreSonus’s three Pro Series of monitors featuring varying woofer diameters.
The Eris Pro 6 Pro monitors have a compact and boxy design despite their considerable power. Thanks to a 6.5-inch woofer, these squat speakers can move serious amounts of air.
Designed as an upgrade from the kind of starter studio monitors made by brands like PreSonus, Yamaha and M-Audio, the new PreSonus Eris Pro 6 features a symmetric design that provides a consistent acoustic center for better phase alignment with a wider sweet spot and precise stereo imaging thanks to a symmetrical dispersion pattern. This makes the Eris Pro 6 particularly suited for Dolby Atmos and stereo-mixing environments. The wider sweet spot is also useful when there are many people crowded around the mixing desk all trying to listen to the playback.
The wide dispersion of the speakers is partly due to the Eris Pro 6’s horn-loaded coaxial design. This puts the tweeter at the heart of the woofer so that both drivers project their sound from a single acoustic point source that creates a more natural listening experience capable of revealing subtleties that a conventional design might not. The coaxial arrangement also helps produce a three-dimensional soundstage with a detailed transient response.
The Eris Pro 6 monitors have a punchy low end with enough amplification for any home recording setup or a professional mixing room in a commercial studio. The higher frequencies are produced by a 1.25-inch silk-dome tweeter while the woofer surrounding it is a 6.
5-inch, woven-composite cone that PreSonus says has a “tight, clear bass, with plenty of punch.” The Eris Pro 6 cabinets are front ported and bi-amped with 140W of power that enables the monitors to delve down to an impressive 35Hz, while still offering a detailed transient response and the sort of dynamics that can produce a more natural-sounding and less fatiguing listening experience. To get the most out of the Eris Pro 6, PreSonus has incorporated acoustic tuning controls as well as three-way Acoustic Space Tuning lets the user tweak the sound from the speakers to suit any room or placement.
The Acoustic Space Tuning has three settings for placement adjustments such as corners, walls and open room. There is also a separate control for high frequencies with options for ±6 dB, center 10 kHz and continuously variable. A Mid Frequency control provides ±6 dB, center 1kHz and continuously variable settings.
Meanwhile, a Low-Cut filter provides Flat, 80Hz, 100Hz @ -12dB / octave. PreSonus has also added something called a soft start circuit that stops the speakers from making the hideous thumping sound that some speakers can produce when they are turned on or off. Finally, there is a subsonic filter for eliminating any unwanted ultra‐low frequencies.
The amplifier in each of the Eris Studio 6 is Class AB and bi-amped with a crossover set at 3.2kHz. The lower frequency response starts at 35Hz and the upper frequencies top out at 20kHz, which is wider than some floor-standing speakers.
The woofer is fed with 75W of power while the balance of 65W goes to the tweeter. The maximum SPL is 106dB at 1 meter. Each of the PreSonus Eris Pro 6 cabinets is made from vinyl-laminated, medium-density fiberboard with rounded corners that give the cabinets the appearance of being made from high-quality polycarbonate.
The cabinets are internally braced to reduce resonance while the bass frequencies can vent through a front‐facing reflex port. At the rear of the speakers, there is a solid metal plate where the controls and inputs are located. As usual with these kinds of monitors, each unit has a selection of unbalanced RCA phono, TRS balanced quarter‐inch jack or balanced XLR and there is a master rotary control to adjust the master input gain, The PreSonus Eris 6 Pro are designed to punch above their weight considering the relatively affordable price.
While they are not intended to compete with the kind of ultra-high-end studio monitors from Focal, Neumann and others used in some of the world’s best recording studios, the PreSonus Eris Pro 6 are designed to offer a significant step up from starter models made by the likes of Yamaha and Edifier. Aimed squarely at home studios looking for a premium mixing monitor, the upgrade to the Eris Pro 6 could reveal more detail than most budget studio monitors. The new PreSonus Eris Pro 6 studio monitors are shipping now priced at $279.
99 / £349 per monitor. Type: Single point-source coaxial. Woofer: 6.
5-inch, woven-composite cone. Tweeter: 1.25-inch, silk-dome.
Power output: 140W, Class AB per channel. Frequency response: 35Hz to 20kHz. Sound pressure level: 106dB SPL (Peak, @ 1 meter) Acoustic Tuning Controls: Acoustic Space (Flat, -2 dB, -4 dB), High Frequency (±6 dB, center 10 kHz, continuously variable), Mid Frequency (±6 dB, center 1 kHz, continuously variable), Low Cut (Flat, 80 Hz, 100 Hz @ -12 dB / octave).
Inputs: XLR and 1⁄4-inch TRS balanced and RCA unbalanced. Protection: RF interference, output-current limiting, over-temperature, turn-on/off transient, subsonic filter. Power saver mode: Engages after 40 minutes.
Mounting: Wall and ceiling..
