Top Seven 5.1 PC Speaker Comparison

We asked all the players in the market to send us their latest 5.1 packages, and received cooperation from Artis, Logitech, Creative, Zebronics, Philips, Altec lansing and Tech-com. We have quite a varied sample of the available options, and now we are going to take them all on an audio road trip with loads of audio material, and play army PT instructor...

The Test process
So what does one exactly look for in a speaker? Our test process is straight forward, and covers all the basics, and a few advances. First and foremost, we look at aesthetics, which is the simplest method of actually putting the speakers in your face, and seeing if it can fit in any decor and also whether the design is wacky enough or too wacky, as there is a thin line between futuristic cool, and just plain over-the-top tacky. Aesthetics go hand in hand with build quality. Thus plasticky edges and boring finishes are frowned upon.

This area is of course subjective, as you can never please everyone but more or less, a good level of innovation in design never goes unnoticed. The weight of the system is a factor, and from the weight comes portability and ease of positioning. Since there will be five speakers, not two, one pair will have to be kept at the back. Thus stuff like wire length and their arrangement are taken into consideration. This is mainly because in a 5.1 system one is dealing with amounts of wire enough to hassle you beyond imagination. Color coded wires are given preference, as that adds to the ease of set up and use.

Then comes the features and connectivity options. Generally the subwoofer is the house of the amplifier for the system, and all connections need to be made to it. Any product with a remote gets extra points, and Dolby or even DTS decoding is an added plus. Thus these can be connected without the help of a 5 channel soundcard - remember here we are not using an AV receiver. Thus the decoding has to be done either by your soundcard, or by the speaker system itself. The accessibility to volume knobs, design of the control pod etc. are looked at, this is especially important for those systems without remote.

After the physical test finish, we move on to audio performance tests, and this is a whole ball game totally. We have created tones, plus the trusted test CDs from Sheffield, and pristine recordings of Chesky. Our attention goes initially to the bass response, and immediately full frequency response. For this a sine tone sweep is launched and checked for inconsistencies in level, off course we already negated our room effects. Lower limits of bass response are checked by audibly checking how low our tones reach. Then we play transients like a drum beat and bass guitar sounds to check timing and accuracy of the bass. Any boominess in the output is caught red handed here in this test. Since we are dealing with surround, we check a full 5.1 surround sound AC3 file that pans around, exerting each speaker.

Pure loudness I gauged separately with both highly compressed recordings and also open live recordings of classical music, to see how the speakers handle output at highest volume level. Here there should be no distortion, as that would be the weakness of the speaker. It should not fart in heavy bass thuds and intense parts in movies.