7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Wow! Acoustic Pleasure!
Date of Review: Aug 5, 2005
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for some good computer speakers at a great price, here's what you're looking for!
Wow! End of review.
Seriously though, these speakers FAR exceeded my expectations! Search a bit and you can find a pair for about $35 shipped, which is the lowest price that I've seen them. Thing is, even for the $35 they sound as good as the speakers that were packaged with my expensive Pioneer home theater system!
Opening the package, there's a nice colorful diagram showing how to set them up. I guess that's a nice touch, I immediately threw it aside. Removing the top foam piece from the box (screech, oh how I hate that sound) reveals a nicely packed set of 5 speakers.
Each of the four channels is color coded and keyed such that they only plug into their appropriate plug. (Other than they keyed shapes they're standard RCA plugs) Each of them has a very long wire, enough to route the rear channels along my wall, around a table, and back across another desk behind me.
The center channel is a nice dual speaker, ported unit that can either mount to a special bracket on Dell LCD monitors or the included bracket that either points it up or down depending on whether it's on your desk or on top of your CRT monitor. Putting it in the aluminum bracket is a little bit difficult at first, but if you bend the bracket a little it goes right in. The center speaker has a nice long cable with an analog monitor style plug at the end. On this speaker is the on/off/volume knob & a green power indicator LED. Unfortunately this knob does not seem to turn off the subwoofer as well as it remains warm to the touch even with this main knob turned off.
The centerpiece of this beautiful set of speakers is a surprisingly solid sounding subwoofer. It has a standard 2 prong A/C power cable to power the system and all of the hookups on the back. During operation it feels a little bit warm, so you probably don't want to enclose it. The speaker is mounted in a bass-reflex configuration, though at first it appears that it might be a bandpass setup. The bass is quite clear and strong for all types of music from Rap to Classical. IMO the bass-reflex design really is best for general purpose listening. On the front of the enclosure is a nice large knob to adjust the subwoofer level. Putting this knob on the front is a nice touch. At the center of its rotation there is a detent to indicate the default setting, which gives relatively good balance and is where I run the speaker.
Hookup: The LONG leads to the input source terminate in three 2.5mm stereo style plugs. If your computer has a 5.1 capable soundcard each of these will plug into its respective plug giving you 6 unique audio channels. If your computer/iPod/CD players/etc does not support 5.1 audio an included adapter splits your output signal to the 6 independent channels. Overall the audio quality is still very good, even with this combined setup.
Anyhow, in conclusion: clear highs, strong mids, solid lows, great price!
