Top Three 2.0 PC speakers

All the leading brands in the PC speaker segment now have 2.0 speakers as their flagship model, and claim to deliver great sound without the use of the heavy bass subwoofer. These speakers come in sweet looking designs, and more often than not, they impress with some good performance.

Now, it’s a showdown between Creative’s Gigaworks T40 series 2, Logitech’s Z10 and Audioengine’s A2, all active 2.0 sets of speakers meant for PC usage, but without subwoofers. There is one more model by Altec, the Expressionist Bass, but that is a little different in its design, I will cover that in detail next week. The first 3 pages are individual excerpts from the reviews, while the final page is a comparison page with table and verdict.

Logitech Z10
Rs. 10,495

In no particular order, I will start with the Z10. These are like bookshelf speakers, in fact in theory they might as well be, active bookshelf speakers for audio enthusiasts. These are quite heavy and tall. A black glossy finish adorns and makes up the front panel, while the rest of the cabinet is also black with a lusterless finish. There is an orange backlit screen that displays track info, volume settings and along with it we have the controls, quite beautifully integrated. They are flush with the smooth front panel and are touch sensitive.

These 30 watt RMS speakers are quite loud, plus the 2 way configuration calls for  2 drivers in each unit: a 1-inch tweeter and a 3-inch woofer. The internal design of the speakers is bi-amped, which means the woofers and tweeter are powered separately, plus there is a digital crossover. The unit connects via USB 2.0, and is a simple plug and play design.

One con we found was that the display does not work with any and every player. It only works with Winamp, Windows Media player and Real player. The sound was loud, and there was no distortion all the way up to max volume, a good sign from a well engineered model. Since this is a shootout, I saw things in a comparative perspective. Here the bass is averagely tight, and goes down till about 55 Hz. Again in the top end we had a clear response, no jarring and overemphasis of highs.