Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These A100's are compact and sound okay, especially if you apply equalization. See below for the equalization parameters I used. I have a Dell monitor with its accompanying Sound Bar. I used to have relatively high-end computer speakers but at some point I started to value compactness and simplicity over sound quality, hence I got the Sound Bar with the monitor. But eventually my pendulum swung the other way and I decided I wanted better quality, but keep simplicity, and not take up a lot of desktop space. I gave these AmazonBasics A100's a try because they're so inexpensive, I figured even if I didn't like them, I wouldn't mind having spent the very little money on them that they cost. Plus, I figured, they couldn't sound worse than the Sound Bar. I love the fact that I can plug the USB power cable into the back of the monitor, alleviating some cable clutter behind and under my desk. The sound quality slightly exceeds that of the Dell Sound Bar. Both have the nice feature that even when the volume is cranked up, if there is no signal, they don't produce much audible hissing noise. Plenty of cheap speakers audibly hiss when turned up, but not these. My ASUS Xonar DGX sound card (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007TMZ1BK/) has an equalizer in the driver, so I decided to measure the frequency response of these A100's and the Dell Sound Bar, then compensate for each. Here's the compensation based on the frequency response I measured for the A100's: Frequency in Hz , Amplification in dB: 30 , +20 60 , +20 120 , 9 250 , +3 500 , -6 1000 , +1 2000 , +4 4000 , -14 8000 , +1 16000 , +10 I applied that amount of amplification per channel using the Asus Xonar DGX Audio Center. The improvement is night-and-day better. (If you really want to dial in the compensation better than the GUI sliders let you, you can manually edit the text in the config file directly. It's here: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\ASUS\Xonar DGX Audio Center\cmicnfp.ini. The units are logarithmic, where 1310720 corresponds to 20 dB, and the bands 0-9 correspond to the frequencies listed above.) I applied the same procedure to the Dell Sound Bar. The main difference is that in the 120 Hz band, the Sound Bar response was also below what I could measure. The upshot is that more of the audible frequencies in the Dell were uncalibratable, compared to the A100. So, even after equalizing both, the A100's sound better than the Dell Sound Bar. As you can infer from the chart above, the A100's do not generate much pressure in the extreme low (<=60 Hz) and high (>= 16 kHz) frequencies. That's what you should expect. It would be extraordinarily difficult for such tiny speakers to generate a lot of bass, and without separate tweeters, I wouldn't expect the extreme high-end to sound very crisp. Obviously this is a lot of effort to go through for $14 speakers. I did it out of curiosity more than dedication to making these speakers work for me. The next step up I would take would be a drastic leap from these: Probably AudioEngine A2+ or Vanatoo Transparent One, which cost literally an order of magnitude more money, and take up significantly more desktop space. Not a fair comparison with the A100's. So this was a fun little exercise before diving into spending real money. In summary, these speakers are worth what they cost, and you can get a heck of a lot more out of them if you apply equalization -- which some sound cards offer.