This a review and detailed measurements of the PreSonus Eris E5 XT powered "studio monitor." I purchased it from Amazon back in January of this year. It currently costs US $150 (each) on Amazon including Prime shipping.
The look and feel of the E5 is quite nice despite its budget price:
A fully formed waveguide a very nice touch and should create a proper hand off to the woofer at crossover frequencies, resulting in similar off-axis and on-axis response (measurements to confirm). Amplification is quite anemic at 20/30 (?) watts but that is to be expected in this price range.
Lots of controls are provided which indicated it is using analog active crossover:
I tested the E5 as pictured. I rotated the gain settings until they clicked on the detente.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
Spinorama Audio Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker can be used. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws (ignore the absolute SPL level -- they are incorrect):
We have very good and very bad news. Good news is that the waveguide is doing its job resulting in very smooth early window directivity graph (dashed blue line at the bottom). So speaker should be very room friendly.
Bad news is obvious: we have two peaks at low and high frequencies with a wide dip overall, and two deeper ones within, with the worst case being the crossover region around 3 kHz. I don't mind the bass boost but like to see flat response otherwise until 10 kHz. We don't have this. The sound then will be bass and maybe high heavy with middle stuff lost.
Because the directivity is good, room reflections mimic the direct sound which in this case is not a good thing since they accentuate the problem:
The dip is deeper here. No surprise then that the predicted in-room response in a simulated listening room is anything but smooth:
When performing distortion tests, I could hear nasty distortions in low frequencies which showed up in a bad way in my reference 96 dB SPL @ 1 meter (room reflections filtered):
For best speakers, there should only be a a few peaks below a few hundred hertz. Here distortion spans far and wide. Zooming in with percentage distortion we see even a nastier presentation:
That woofer or its amplifier is really struggling to produce clean sound.
Reducing levels to 86 dB @ 1 meter cleans up the situation a lot:
Still, the woofer or its amp continue to be the weak link.
Horizontal directivity plot shows the smooth envelop that we like to see as we move off-axis but of course the level varies as we saw in the spinorama:
We want that smooth envelop with similar colors so they are not separated from each other. Half the problem is solved but not the other.
Vertical is bad but it is in many designs:
Finally, here is our obligatory CSD/waterfall, again room compensated:
Speaker Listening Tests
Being a near-filed monitor, I decided to test it at my workstation. The E5 was placed on the left of my monitor with a 5 inch or so stand pointed up. First impression wasn't bad with noticeable amount of bass but then brightness come in and it wasn't so pleasant. By itself, I thought "this is not as bad sounding as the measurements indicate."
Then I turned on the JBL LSR305P on the right and compared one channel at a time, levels matched. Now the game was afoot! The LSR305P wiped the floor with the E5. While the female voices would get lost in the PresSonus, the LSR305 provided superb, clear reproduction. Even male vocals had clarity that simply was not there with the E5.
Now, the E5 has plenty of bass. Turn up the level though and you hear gurgling sound which seemed to be an amplifier overload condition rather than the driver bottoming out. Here is the problem: once you hear the drivers distorting, you can't unhear them when you lower the level! The bass while pronounced and at much higher levels than the 305P, it just doesn't sound clean.
When you turn up the volume on the LSR 305, a nice limited simply stops it from playing too loud and distorted. This seems to be a better approach than letting the speaker beat its brains out as the E5 XT does.
Overall, I stopped listening to the PreSonus E5 XT and continued playing the LSR 305P!
Conclusions
PreSonus nails the look and feel of the E5 XT. It has a higher end feel than many budget speakers. The waveguide is effective in providing even response side to side which is nice. The boosted lows and highs though seems to have been aimed at selling the speaker in a showroom. It does impress at first. And especially so if you don't compare it to another speaker, level matched. When you do that though, the shortcomings of the E5 XT come to surface with uneven tonality and tons of distortion from its bass driver.
The JBL LSR305P is going for just US $109 which is $50 cheaper than the E5 XT. It sounds hi-fi in the way that E5 XT simply doesn't. It lacks a bit of bass but I think you could boost its response there and maybe get the same thing as E5 has.
Overall, despite the online buzz that PreSonus E5 XT has, I cannot recommend it. I am here to guide you to proper sound and that calls for flat or flattish frequency response. You are not going to get that E5.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
I am thinking every time I review a product that doesn't perform, I should get hazard pay. How do you all feel about 2X of the normal compensation? If you agree, please up your donations using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The look and feel of the E5 is quite nice despite its budget price:
A fully formed waveguide a very nice touch and should create a proper hand off to the woofer at crossover frequencies, resulting in similar off-axis and on-axis response (measurements to confirm). Amplification is quite anemic at 20/30 (?) watts but that is to be expected in this price range.
Lots of controls are provided which indicated it is using analog active crossover:
I tested the E5 as pictured. I rotated the gain settings until they clicked on the detente.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
Spinorama Audio Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker can be used. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws (ignore the absolute SPL level -- they are incorrect):
We have very good and very bad news. Good news is that the waveguide is doing its job resulting in very smooth early window directivity graph (dashed blue line at the bottom). So speaker should be very room friendly.
Bad news is obvious: we have two peaks at low and high frequencies with a wide dip overall, and two deeper ones within, with the worst case being the crossover region around 3 kHz. I don't mind the bass boost but like to see flat response otherwise until 10 kHz. We don't have this. The sound then will be bass and maybe high heavy with middle stuff lost.
Because the directivity is good, room reflections mimic the direct sound which in this case is not a good thing since they accentuate the problem:
The dip is deeper here. No surprise then that the predicted in-room response in a simulated listening room is anything but smooth:
When performing distortion tests, I could hear nasty distortions in low frequencies which showed up in a bad way in my reference 96 dB SPL @ 1 meter (room reflections filtered):
For best speakers, there should only be a a few peaks below a few hundred hertz. Here distortion spans far and wide. Zooming in with percentage distortion we see even a nastier presentation:
That woofer or its amplifier is really struggling to produce clean sound.
Reducing levels to 86 dB @ 1 meter cleans up the situation a lot:
Still, the woofer or its amp continue to be the weak link.
Horizontal directivity plot shows the smooth envelop that we like to see as we move off-axis but of course the level varies as we saw in the spinorama:
We want that smooth envelop with similar colors so they are not separated from each other. Half the problem is solved but not the other.
Vertical is bad but it is in many designs:
Finally, here is our obligatory CSD/waterfall, again room compensated:
Speaker Listening Tests
Being a near-filed monitor, I decided to test it at my workstation. The E5 was placed on the left of my monitor with a 5 inch or so stand pointed up. First impression wasn't bad with noticeable amount of bass but then brightness come in and it wasn't so pleasant. By itself, I thought "this is not as bad sounding as the measurements indicate."
Then I turned on the JBL LSR305P on the right and compared one channel at a time, levels matched. Now the game was afoot! The LSR305P wiped the floor with the E5. While the female voices would get lost in the PresSonus, the LSR305 provided superb, clear reproduction. Even male vocals had clarity that simply was not there with the E5.
Now, the E5 has plenty of bass. Turn up the level though and you hear gurgling sound which seemed to be an amplifier overload condition rather than the driver bottoming out. Here is the problem: once you hear the drivers distorting, you can't unhear them when you lower the level! The bass while pronounced and at much higher levels than the 305P, it just doesn't sound clean.
When you turn up the volume on the LSR 305, a nice limited simply stops it from playing too loud and distorted. This seems to be a better approach than letting the speaker beat its brains out as the E5 XT does.
Overall, I stopped listening to the PreSonus E5 XT and continued playing the LSR 305P!
Conclusions
PreSonus nails the look and feel of the E5 XT. It has a higher end feel than many budget speakers. The waveguide is effective in providing even response side to side which is nice. The boosted lows and highs though seems to have been aimed at selling the speaker in a showroom. It does impress at first. And especially so if you don't compare it to another speaker, level matched. When you do that though, the shortcomings of the E5 XT come to surface with uneven tonality and tons of distortion from its bass driver.
The JBL LSR305P is going for just US $109 which is $50 cheaper than the E5 XT. It sounds hi-fi in the way that E5 XT simply doesn't. It lacks a bit of bass but I think you could boost its response there and maybe get the same thing as E5 has.
Overall, despite the online buzz that PreSonus E5 XT has, I cannot recommend it. I am here to guide you to proper sound and that calls for flat or flattish frequency response. You are not going to get that E5.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
I am thinking every time I review a product that doesn't perform, I should get hazard pay. How do you all feel about 2X of the normal compensation? If you agree, please up your donations using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
some like to try out the anechoic correction filter seen above so lets attach some convolution filters to this post 
