Presonus Eris E8 XT £422/pair

Presonus have updated their Eris-series monitors but retained their competitive prices. Are these the best budget speakers you can buy?

No matter what software you use, the results of all your music making must be heard through either accurate studio monitors or decent headphones. If your ’phones or monitors are not delivering your mix to you with this honesty, you’ll mix it incorrectly, and it will sound bad on any other playback system. That’s the theory. The other part of this theory is that ‘proper’ studio speakers cost a fortune. Luckily, that part of the theory has been challenged more and more over recent years…

You can go cheap

Recent monitors from JBL, Adam, Eve and others have proven that you can get accurate speakers at lower costs. Another company who have made bold claims on a budget are Presonus, and their Eris range certainly turned a few heads when it was released back in 2013. The XT range is the latest update to Eris and we have the E8 XT on test here. It’s a big speaker, with a big sound, and at just over £400 a pair – cheap in a market where you can easily pay well into four figures for decent monitors – these look like a lot of speaker for the cash.

First up a quick look at the specs. The ‘8’ in the title stands for the 8-inch low-frequency woofer (there’s are smaller E5 model in the range too, with a 5-inch woofer). This, along with the 1.25-inch silk-dome, high-frequency tweeter, response of 35Hz to 20kHz – pretty good low-end specs, especially without a subwoofer.

Power-wise, you are getting 75W (from the LF driver) and 65W (the HF) so, as we hinted at earlier, these are for mid- to large-sized spaces, something enforced with the new XT Waveguide addition – see box below – that allows for a bigger listening experience. And with the large physical size of the speakers – weighing in at over 10kg a speaker and over 40cm high – these will clearly be overkill for small studios.