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I'm convinced that audio speaker companies are run by retired military contractors. With war machines you have throw weight, displacement, and S-bend distortion. Step into a speaker store, and you'll be accosted by air displacement, front-facing drivers, presence, and negative diffraction.
Like military equipment, many speakers seem as overpriced as a $640 military-grade toilet seat. A decent set of speakers can cost less than $200—but you can spend thousands on what often look like refugees from the set of Serenity.
But what if you just want a nice-sounding set of speakers to augment your PC or notebook? Do you have to spend hundreds of dollars? I was in that boat recently. I finally got fed up with the miserable speakers on my ThinkPad X40—located conveniently on the bottom of the system. Tiny, tinny, and often obscured, they were hardly better than the single speaker found in IBM's original PC. But I didn't want to spend a lot—and I didn't care much about air displacement scores (although I did wonder idly what all that air was displaced with).
So I set out to find a decent set of stereo speakers—with subwoofer—for less than $50. Best Buy yielded the cheapest speakers in the test, a $25 rig from Cyber Acoustics. Circuit City came up with two $49.99 offerings—the Creative Inspire T3000 2.1 and the Logitech X-230. For the same price, CompUSA produced the Altec Lansing VS2221.
I then rounded up 11 of my coworkers, connected the speakers to a laptop, and conducted a series of listening tests using a mix of audio files ranging from Beethoven to Stereolab, along with a PC version of Halo. My guinea pigs were allowed to twiddle the volume and bass controls to their hearts' content, to achieve the best sound for their ears.
Each set theoretically includes a subwoofer, but Cyber Acoustics stretched the definition to the breaking point—theirs was simply a 3-inch speaker bolted to the bottom of a small cabinet. The others had more traditional designs, albeit clad in marketing mumbo-jumbo. Creative's was made from "ported wood," Logitech claims "dynamic, real-time bass equalization," while Altec Lansing describes its subwoofer as "front-firing" and "long-throw." Gosh, I hope it doesn't break any windows.
The Creative speakers were the only ones to put tone controls on a convenient, separate remote. The others scattered them about the speaker cabinets—except for the Cyber Acoustics, which didn't offer any tonal adjustments at all.—Continue reading