Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After seeing more than a thousand five-star reviews for this product I was looking forward to getting some great inexpensive speakers. And indeed the system looked great while unpacking and setting it up The construction of the subwoofer box and the other components is solid, and I really like the hockey puck control pod with master volume, subwoofer volume, power switch, and aux and headphone jacks. It looks and feels like a more expensive system. But listening to it for the first time was surprisingly unpleasant. Good speakers produce clear, unobtrusive sound without embellishment, but these speakers manage to sound boomy and tinny at the same time. The bass is muddy and the midrange sounds thin. On the plus side, the highs are fine - cymbal crashes are perfectly clear and natural. Since adjectives like "muddy" are not very useful, I wanted to find an objective explanation for why the sound from the CAs is so much more annoying than my other computer speakers, Dell A525 and Altec Lansing VS2621. So I set up each speaker system in turn in a semi-quiet part of the basement, fed them with white noise, recorded the sound using a decent microphone (Zoom H2n), and measured the frequency response averaged over 30 seconds. Surprisingly, the combined frequency response was similar for all three speakers. But the Dell and CA have an adjustable subwoofer volume, so I also measured the main speakers with the subwoofer turned all the way up, and all the way down (off). That's where a difference showed up - the CA main speakers have a sharp cutoff with very little output below 300 Hz (down 18dB from 400 to 200 Hz), whereas the Dells fall off much more gradually - down 6dB at 200 Hz and 12 dB at 100 Hz. That is a big difference, and the missing low end from the main drivers seems to explain what I hate about the CA's sound. Unfortunately, I was unable to test the Altec-Lansing response without the subwoofer because it can't be turned off - the tone control adjusts the level of the main speakers on that system. I've posted a picture of the test results - the CA is shown as yellow (normal) and green (min and max subwoofer), the Dell is shown as red (normal) and purple (min subwoofer). The background room noise is blue. You can see the overall frequency response (red and yellow) agree fairly closely, but the green is far below the purple between 100 and 300 Hz. Pros for this product: * solid construction quality * nice controller design * no noticeable buzz or distortion * clear high end up to 18KHz Cons: * poor low-end response for the main speakers (without subwoofer), unnatural sound If you want speakers for gaming sound effects, these should be fine. But if you want clear, natural-sounding music, look elsewhere. The similarly-priced Altec-Lansings aren't studio monitors, but they sound better than this.