Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live
Plexwriter 40/12/40A CD-RW
Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-ROM
Creative DVD (DXR2)
Ricoh MP7163A CD-RW
Sony Playstation /2
Placement :
Satellites set at 1 metre spacing with sub floor
mounted and corner loaded below 1 inch thick chipboard worstation.
Carpeted floor. Room dimensions 5 metres x 4 metres.
Test 1 :
Choice of media :
Supertramp: Breakfast in America. CD
Beethoven : The Ruins of Athens : CD
Destiny's Child : Bills, Bills, Bills : CD
Jean Michelle Jarre : Oxygene, Rendezvous, Equinoxe : CD
Mike Oldfield : Tubular bells 2 : CD
Queen : Another one bites the dust : Cakewalk Scorewriter
Beethoven : The Ruins of Athens : Sibelius Scorewriter
I must admit to have prejudged these speakers
slightly. With four 1 inch drivers handling the highs and a
subwoofer taking care of the bass I was pretty convinced the
midrange frequencies would be missing in action. Either that
or I would find the sub handling the mids meaning no stereo
separation and a completely screwed sound stage. If you're not
sure what a sound stage is, it's simply the "virtual"
sound source that's created between the two satellite speakers.
By having only the high frequencies properly imaged and the
mids and lows handles by the sub I was worried that the sound
stage would collapse into a fuzzy mess with well positioned
highs being destroyed by an essentially mono mid and low frequency
range. Remarkably I was wrong. The highs were clean and crisp,
in fact a little too crisp at times to the point that rather
than having the drivers firing straight to my listening position
I found it better to rotate them slightly away from me. After
a bit of fiddling I actually decided that the best effect was
achieved with the satellites a little further apart than the
1 metre spacing I started with. You need to be careful with
the spacing of 2.1 setups simply because if the speakers are
too close you end up with a poor sound stage as the two satellite
outputs merge into a vague mono effect. Too far apart and you
create a "hole" between the satellites that again
destroys the listening effect. This is the main reason for the
use of a centre speaker in 5.1 systems, it allows the front
speakers to be spaced further apart while the centre speaker
fills the "hole" that's created.
Instrumentation and vocal response was bright
and clear on the pop tracks, classical music lacked bite but
the sound was not displeasing. Colouration from the units was
minimal, the foot of each satellite being well padded and this
did not change even on different surfaces.
After about 45 minutes of listening and fiddling
I finally settled on a satellite spacing of about 4 foot which
in my setting seemed to offer the best performance. The bass
was impressive to say the least. It was tight and well controlled
with no booming even at higher volume levels, while the midrange
was also impressive, particularly when the satellites were turned
away from my listening position to take the edge off the high
end. So where are the midrange frequencies coming from? Unfortunately
as with almost all PC speakers, including the more expensive
high end jobs the sub is handling the vast majority of it, but
strangely they do a very decent job of it. Only by slicing away
the highs did the sub start to give clues about where is was
situated. Because bass is non-directional a sub playing only
genuine bass frequencies below 60-80Hz should give no indication
as to its location, but the fact that it's possible to locate
the sub from its output suggests it's handling frequencies well
in excess of this. But like I said, the effect isn't unpleasant,
in fact it's very cleverly done. I'm no audiophile, and quite
how Altec have squeezed such effective frequency ranges from
this limited assortment of driver sizes is a mystery to me,
but they have.
That's not to say the midrange is perfect, it's definitely not
as strong as the top and bottom end and could still be seen
as a weak point in the overall design, but we're not reviewing
a product aimed at the true audio enthusiast, we're reviewing
a sensibly priced speaker system that's meant to serve as a
great gaming system while doubling as a good platform for general
audio use.
Overall I think it's fair to say that the sound
quality was incredible, the claims of sound purity on the box
are not just marketing slogans, they're facts that hold up under
testing and for a sub £100 speaker system it's all the
more praiseworthy.
Test 2 :
Max Payne : Game
Giants : Game
Quake3 Arena : Game
Incoming Forces : Game
eRacer : Game
B&W : Game
Project IGI : Game
Contact : DVD Movie
SpeciesII : DVD Movie
The Matrix : DVD Movie
Mars Attacks : DVD Movie
Blade : DVD Movie
Using the settings determined from test 1 I fired
up a few games. Again the sound quality was awesome with every
rumbling explosion or clicking ammo clip recreated to near perfection.
What might disappoint is that pumping the volume too high caused
some serious clipping problems with sound popping and spitting
quite badly. Admittedly this was at volume levels most people
won't use but gamers are notorious for wanting to rattle their
fillings loose and at these volumes clipping became a real problem.
I tried mixing and matching various mixer settings with various
speaker volumes but in all cases the clipping reared its ugly
head once the sound levels were increased. First impressions
are that the amp and speakers aren't quite as well matched as
they could be but that's just my untrained observation, there
could be other reasons for it.
Like I said, in normal use at "sane" volume levels
and some way beyond there's absolutely no complaints from me.
DVD's were also impressive other than the failings
any 2.1 speaker setup would encounter attempting to play an
audio source with more than two discrete channels of audio data
. In many ways 2.1 speaker systems are a compromise and to compensate
for this you need to be certain you're buying good quality to
compensate for these failings. For the most part the DVD audio
was played accurately with excellent range and nice tight bass.
Vocals were clear and defined and never became swamped by other
more aggressive sound frequencies.
As a final test I pumped a selection of test tones,
white noise and pink noise through to test for spatialization
and other less than exciting characteristics. Because Altec
don't list the crossover frequency for this particular set (not
that I could find anyway) it was hard to test performance around
that frequency but using a variety of test tones at around 150Hz
which is where I expect to find it showed no obvious problems.
The 40Hz test tone produced a rather muddy result suggesting
the claimed frequency range is a little optimistic with 60Hz
being the lowest frequency that played anything like properly,
but again this is par for the course even on considerably more
expensive speakers. The 15KHz test tone was handled well and
although the 20KHz tone was audible a lot of people can't hear
such high frequencies and I couldn't hear it well enough to
form an impression as to the quality. Generally the range of
human hearing is considered to be from 20Hz to 20KHz but in
practice the range is often narrower than that.
The biggest annoyance I faced was down to the
wired remote and in particular the volume setting. The use of
two buttons rather than a rotary dial to adjust the volume settings
means you have no visual cues as to what level you're set at.
This in itself would be a minor annoyance but for the fact that
when you power off the volume defaults back to minimum again.
To overcome this problem you could of course set your desired
listening level then leave the speakers powered constantly but
that's not something I particularly want to do. This and the
bass control being positioned on the sub slightly spoil an otherwise
superb set of speakers.
Conclusion :
PROs
Stylish
and space saving design
Wooden Subwoofer cabinet
Dual Speaker Sub
Good Price
Crisp, Pure, High Quality Sound
Easy connection
CONs
Volume
setting is a bind
No virtual surround or wide stereo settings
Midrange a touch lacking
Altec Lansing seem to be developing a knack for
getting big sounds from diminutive speakers and then marketing
them at a price almost anyone can afford. If you've got less
than £100 to spend and want a solid 2.1 speaker system
these should be on your shortlist. Fortunately for those of
you who seek a little more, Altec will be launching a six piece
(5.1) system based on the 2100 design this summer.
The high tech looks and surprisingly high quality
sound make this an impressive piece of kit that leaves you wondering
how it's physically possible for such compact units to create
such room filling sounds. The weaknesses with regards the slightly
lacking midrange, poorly placed bass level control and badly
implemented volume control just take the gilding off an otherwise
superb value speaker system and stop it scooping an award that
otherwise I'd have had no hesitation in handing out.
.
Huge thanks to Kate Ballard of Euro-Tech
for making this review possible
