Eris E7 XT
Price: approx £160 each (retail)
Presonus has announced a new member of its popular monitor speaker family. Sitting between the E5 (with a 5” woofer) and the E8 (with an 8” woofer), the E7, as you would expect, features a 7” woofer. Following in the footsteps of its siblings, it has a 100° wide ‘sweet spot’ horizontal dispersion and a cleverly designed vertical dispersion to avoid the reflection of sound from a desk!
There are lots of sound-shaping options on the rear panel, including a low cut, mid and treble EQ, and three-way acoustic space tuning for rooms that are not acoustically perfect. The speaker features the usual jack, XLR and RCA phono inputs and could be a great mid-sized monitor for school studios.
www.presonus.com/products/Eris-E7-XT
MultiMod
Price: $50 (introductory offer)
Plugin giant Waves has so many plugins it's difficult to count, with releases at frequent intervals. Its latest offering combines three of its best distortion and saturation plugins into one effect. Combining the MDMX overdrive, the Bezerk distortion and the Abbey Road Saturation plugins, you can create any form of ‘push’ that you might desire.
However, what makes MultiMod intriguing is that you can apply the three of these to different EQ bands of a sound. So you could have a growly distortion on the low frequencies and just a gentle saturation as if running through a pushed console. Also, with the name Mod in its title, any parameter can be modulated to create some wild and crazy sounds as well as beautifully driven sounds.
EboSuite
Price: €159 (retail)
Ableton Live is a brilliant piece of software for creating music, as the name suggests, live. You can record, play and manipulate clips on the fly, and it works quite differently from most other DAWs. What it has never been appropriate for is audio-visual work. Its ability to handle video was much less advanced than its competitors. That could be about to change with EboSuite.
The EboSuite plugin allows users to import sections of video into Ableton's Clip view and manipulate them alongside MIDI and Audio. Suitable for enhancing live electronic music performances or creating mash-up pieces of music from video clips (‘Buttery Biscuit Bass’, anyone?) this could revolutionise audio-video work for a large number of musicians.
iRig Pro Duo
Price: €199 (retail)
Recording equipment can be very expensive. IK Multimedia has released a wide range of high-quality, affordable equipment to help make music accessible to as many people as possible. Its latest piece of hardware is an update to the iRig Pro Duo mobile interface. The latest version contains upgraded microphone preamps and has more gain available for less sensitive microphones.
The iRig Pro Duo is compatible with pretty much any piece of equipment you want to use including phones, tablets, PCs and Macs. The interface has two inputs and outputs and connects to your device via a USB-C port. Fortunately for those of us who aren't using USB-C, it also includes a range of suitable adaptors for most tablets and computers.
