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Audio Nirvana: Cards to Speakers

The right combination of speakers and sound card can yield amazing PC audio. We tested five speaker sets and four cards.

Michael Gowan

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A Multiplicity Of Speakers

Altec Lansing's 251 puts audio controls on the front-right satellite, a possible inconvenience.

Altec Lansing's 251 puts audio controls on the front-right satellite, a possible inconvenience.Photograph: Marc Simon
Home theater PC setups have gone from two to six or eight speakers. But more doesn't always mean better--even if you can find the room to properly space out all of those speakers.

The number of units that's right for you depends on what you mostly listen to: Games and movies--whose audio follows the action playing out on screen--sound best with 5.1 or 7.1 systems. Music, on the other hand, can be very pleasing with a simple 2.1 setup consisting of two speakers and a subwoofer (4.1 and 6.1 speaker systems are sold, but we recommend either 5.1 or 7.1, as surround sound seems to work best when you have a center speaker to enhance the other satellites).

Based on the speakers we tested, you can't always use price as your guide to sound quality. Playing music, the $100 Altec Lansing 251 analog 5.1 speakers produced bass and treble tones that sounded almost as good as those of the $500 Creative GigaWorks S750 7.1 speakers. However, the Creative set did a superior job with our DVD of The Matrix Reloaded--not surprising given that the GigaWorks speakers have built-in support for Dolby Digital decoding. The $100, 2.1-channel Logitech Z-3 left the well-defined vocals on an acoustic track disappointingly flat, even when compared with Harman Multimedia's $60 2-channel JBL Duet speakers.

Nothing approached the audio quality of our pick, Klipsch's $400 ProMedia Ultra 5.1. This 5.1-channel system produced round, rich sound on all of our test tracks, and even made low-fi guitar on one instrumental track sound full-bodied.

Too bad that setting up the Klipsch was not as pleasing as listening to it. The Altec Lansing and Creative speakers had intuitive, color-coded wiring, and we pieced those systems together in a few minutes. But the ProMedia Ultra 5.1 took longer because the wires weren't clearly labeled.

The ProMedia Ultra 5.1 and the GigaWorks S750 come with external control modules for adjusting volume and fine-tuning the speaker alignment, along with jacks for headphones and a microphone (the Z-3's external control has only volume adjustment and a headphones connection). But we found these external modules more of a hassle than a convenience, since their additional wires further complicated the spaghetti-like mess of cables we already had around our PC.

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