Our mix room at Meraki runs on a pair of Genelec 8340As. I’ll get to why further down, but they are not where most people should start. At around ₹3.4 lakh a pair, before you’ve bought stands or treated a single wall, they’re a tool for a room that is already built for mixing. This guide is for everyone else, which is most people setting up a first or second studio.
Prices below are Indian street prices for a pair, taken from retailer listings in October 2026. They move around, so check before you buy. I’ve tested the Yamaha HS5 properly. The others are judged on their published specs and on what they’re built to do, and I’ll say so where that’s the case.
First, the room
Spend ten minutes on placement before you spend anything on speakers. Put the two monitors and your head at the corners of an equilateral triangle, with the tweeters at ear height and pointed at your ears. Keep the setup symmetrical left to right: a speaker near a side wall gets more bass than the one in open space, and you’ll end up mixing around the difference without knowing it. Get them off a hollow desk, onto stands or isolation pads, so the desk isn’t resonating along with the woofers. If a monitor’s port is on the back, give it some room from the wall behind it.
Then use the switches on the back. Every monitor in this guide has some way to trim the low or high end for the room. They exist because a speaker pushed near a wall or into a corner gets a bass boost it didn’t ask for, and cutting that back is the first thing to try when the low end sounds bigger than it should.
Under ₹15,000: PreSonus Eris 3.5 (2nd Gen)
About ₹12,500 to ₹15,000 a pair. You get a 3.5-inch woven composite woofer, a 1-inch silk dome tweeter, 50 watts of Class AB amplification for the pair, and a headphone output on the front, which is handy on a desk that doubles as a workstation. There are high and low tuning controls on the back, and balanced TRS inputs alongside RCA and 3.5 mm.
Be clear about what 3.5 inches can’t do. PreSonus quotes the range from 80 Hz, which puts the fundamental of most kick drums and bass lines below what these can reproduce. For editing, podcasting, learning a DAW and writing, they’re a big step up from computer speakers. For deciding how loud the kick and bass should sit in a mix, you’ll need to check on headphones or another system. Our gear database still lists the earlier E3.5; the 2nd Gen is what’s in shops now.
Around ₹33,000: Yamaha HS5, the pair I’d start with
This is the one I’ve lived with. For our review I mixed on a pair for three weeks, and the midrange is the reason to buy them. Vocals and guitars sit forward and uncoloured, so resonances, sibilance and masking are easy to hear instead of being smoothed over.
That honesty has a cost. Next to a warmer speaker they can sound thin at first, and the bass falls away quickly below roughly 70 Hz, so anyone mixing bass-heavy music should plan on a subwoofer or careful headphone checks. The two switches on the back are genuinely useful in an untreated room: Room Control cuts everything below 500 Hz by 2 or 4 dB, and High Trim moves the top end up or down by 2 dB. On paper: a 5-inch cone woofer, a 1-inch dome tweeter, 45 W for the woofer and 25 W for the tweeter, and 54 Hz to 30 kHz. A pair is about ₹32,000 to ₹33,000.
If you’re going to mix on your first pair of real monitors, this is where I’d start. Mixes that sound right on the HS5 tend to hold up everywhere else, and that is the only job a monitor actually has. The full verdict is in our HS5 review.
₹48,000 to ₹56,000: KRK Rokit 5 G5 and ADAM T5V
Both cost noticeably more than the HS5 in India, so each has to earn the difference. I haven’t tested either. This is what they offer on paper.
The Rokit 5 G5 is about ₹24,000 per speaker. Its strongest argument is room tuning: built-in DSP with 25 EQ settings shown on an LCD, which you can also set up with KRK’s app, and a front-firing port that copes better with a nearby wall than a rear port does. That makes it the sensible pick if your desk has to sit against a wall. It also has three voicings, Mix, Create and Focus. Mix on Mix; the other two deliberately change the tonal balance you’re judging against. Specs: a 5-inch woven Kevlar woofer, a 1-inch silk dome tweeter, 35 W plus 20 W of Class D power, and 43 Hz to 40 kHz.
The T5V is about ₹28,000 per speaker. The draw is ADAM’s 1.9-inch U-ART ribbon tweeter in a waveguide, paired with a 5-inch polypropylene woofer, 50 W plus 20 W of Class D power, and a quoted range of 45 Hz to 25 kHz. The back panel has ±2 dB high and low shelf controls and XLR and RCA inputs. The port is on the back, so it needs space from the wall.
One thing to know when comparing those numbers: manufacturers quote frequency range at different tolerances, so 45 Hz on one spec sheet and 54 Hz on another tells you less than it seems. Moving your monitors 30 cm will change your low end more than that difference.
What we use at Meraki: Genelec 8340A
Each 8340A is about ₹1.7 lakh at Indian dealers. It’s a two-way monitor with a 165 mm woofer and a 19 mm metal dome tweeter, each driven by its own 150 W Class D amplifier, in a die-cast aluminium enclosure. Genelec specifies 45 Hz to 20 kHz within ±1.5 dB and at least 110 dB of short-term output, and it takes analogue XLR or AES/EBU digital directly.
The specs aren’t really what you’re paying for. The 8340 is one of Genelec’s Smart Active Monitors, which means it can be measured and corrected for the room it sits in. With Genelec’s GLM kit (a calibrated measurement microphone and a network adapter, sold separately), the GLM software measures each speaker in place and sets its EQ, level and delay. In a room you mix in every day, that takes a lot of guesswork out.
Would I tell someone to buy these for a bedroom studio? No. Without a treated room, the same money is better spent on acoustic treatment and a pair of HS5s, with plenty left over. They make sense once the room is sorted and the work coming through it pays for them.
Do you need a subwoofer?
With 5-inch monitors, often yes, eventually. The bottom octave of a mix sits below what they reproduce at full level. But a sub in an untreated small room can make things worse, because low frequencies are exactly where small rooms misbehave most. Get the monitors placed and the room sorted first, then add a sub if you still can’t judge the low end. Until then, a good pair of headphones is the cheaper second opinion.
Quick picks
Learning, editing or podcasting on a small desk: PreSonus Eris 3.5 (2nd Gen). Your first pair for mixing: Yamaha HS5. A desk that has to sit against a wall: KRK Rokit 5 G5. A ribbon tweeter at the 5-inch size: ADAM T5V. A treated room that mixes paid work every day: Genelec 8340A.