Latest news with #PreSonus
Forbes
20-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
PreSonus Eris Pro 6 Studio Monitors Are An Affordable Home Recording Upgrade
A successful mix starts with a high-quality studio monitor. 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. The PreSonus Eris Pro 6 studio monitors are sold as single units but you'll want two for that stereo ... More mix. 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. The PreSonus Eris Pro 6 has a front reflex port and a horn-loaded coaxial arrangement of a 6.5-inch ... More woofer with a 1.25 silk dome tweeter at its centre. 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. At the rear of the PreSonus Eris Pro 6 are the inputs and acoustic tuning controls for tweaking the ... More sound of the monitors. 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.
WIRED
07-02-2025
- WIRED
PreSonus's Quantum HD Interfaces Help You Make Hit Records
For the longest time, I struggled with latency when recording audio, or the time it takes for recorded sound to register on the screen. I'd plug in my audio interface to my computer, get all my drums all mic'ed up, and have a hard time getting my stuff to sync up with whatever I was trying to record over. The first generation of PreSonus' Quantum audio interfaces solved my problems about a decade ago. They used speedier-than-USB Thunderbolt connections to give me near-zero delay, thanks in part to the no-bloatware connection it shares with PreSonus's Studio One software. PreSonus's latest Quantum HD interfaces have raised the ease-of-use factor even further. You get USB-C connectivity, an even cleaner design, better screen, and front-panel instrument inputs designed in collaboration with PreSonus parent company Fender. There is even now automatic gain leveling on inputs, which means one person can set up a large studio by themselves. If you're after an affordable audio interface that competes with heavy hitters from Universal Audio, Apogee, Focusrite, Audient, or SSL, among others, the new PreSonus Quantum HD models are fantastic and sound great. If you're a Studio One user, they're a no-brainer. Audio Boxers Both the HD 2 and HD 8 models are not much to look at, designed to hide on the desktop of a serious home studio enthusiast amongst other toys. They're both black boxes with blue accents and color screens, and they look relatively nondescript when not in use. (That's nice for expensive studio equipment, which can sometimes scream 'Steal me!') The larger model is rack-mountable, the smaller designed for desktop or mobile use, though you can easily set the larger one on a desk like I did if you don't have a rack to mount it. Photograph: Parker Hall The construction of the unit is solid and metallic, with nice big vents on the sides to keep it cool during longer tracking sessions. I like that it just takes a standard three-prong power cable, so you don't have to deal with a wall wart, and that it connects quickly to any modern USB-C device. I have been a longtime PreSonus user of everything from its Faderport controllers (USB devices that allow you to use faders to control playback in most DAW software) and Monitor Station (an outboard box where you can plug in and swap between multiple speakers with simple button presses). The gear works well and costs less than most competitors. Pro-tier equivalents from brands like Universal Audio and Apogee can cost between a little and many multiples more, depending on the category, and it just doesn't actually sound better in my experience. The Quantum HD interfaces easily compete with the wildly popular 8-input models from Universal Audio in terms of audio and build quality. The Universal Audio models are the gold standard in the category right now, and cost over twice as much per unit. Studio One immediately recognizes the Quantum HD 8 and plays nice, allowing you to do things like turn on 48v phantom power for condenser mics and set levels inside the software, rather than having to use some weird intermediary software between the interface and the DAW. Photograph: Parker Hall
