Computer speakers are a commodity item. There's not many out there these days, with the defacto range in most stores containing only Logitech models. With not much competition, comes not much variety.
The advantage of the computer is that you can pretty much plug any speaker set into one, and get great audio. Well, unless of course you do what I did, and make a mistake - or worse yet, make a mistake, and get an intermittently faulty set of speakers.
image taken from Creative website
I'd like to thank Creative for their attempts to erm, create something unique in the Sound Blaster Pro Gaming X Kratos S5. Bit of a mouthful? That's exactly what it is.
What you get in the box, however is a simple, 2.1 speaker set up, with speakers at about half the volume (in terms of dimensions) of a regular set of bookshelf speakers, and a sub woofer that contains the amplification and control modules for the whole package.
Build quality is about middle of the road as far as speakers go. They're of a fairly light weight, with an appealing looking design - mustard coloured speaker cones in a black box, with a black grill, and of course, the most important part - RGB strip lighting at the base of each satellite.
image taken from Creative website
There's a wired remote control which lets you plug in a 3.5mm headphone and microphone, for when you don't want the entire room to hear what sounds your computer is outputting.
As a product, and as a proposition, they're decent. In practice - my unit quickly developed an intermittent fault to go alongside my other complaints - upon initial power on, the speakers will constantly cut in and out, until you get to the sweet spot in the potentiometer powered volume control.
Likewise, there's that old school, standard hissing sound you get from speakers that are "too loud", when the speakers are barely switched on.
This leads to a poor listening experience, and a fairly muddy response in music, games, and movies. Even worse, the dual audio interface and inputs make no difference. You can plug these speakers in via USB, or 3.5mm PCM, and the issues persist.
I've lodged a warranty claim with my place of purchase, as I'm truly not happy with these shortcomings. The issue with the potentiometer could be repaired, sure - but the other issues can't be fixed as easily.
The experience is passable, the items are functionable, but they're not the mind blowing quality that they're marketed to be. Surprise, surprise.
Music sounds fairly flat, with a bass heavy tune. Sure, you can use the embedded bloatware (software) to change the equalizer effects and do some USB sound card style processing to change the tonality and characteristics of the sound, but out of the box, they're offensively unimpressive across all types of content.
So disappointingly, this is one example in the PC gaming world more RGB does not equal more better. It equals more gimmick and less quality. At the time, I thought these speakers would be a perfect fit, and after looking for speakers for such a long period of time, I thought I'd found my match.
Sadly, the best pair of computer speakers I ever owned were a pair of Hercules 2.1 speakers. For a very long time, I then used a Yamaha home theater amplifier before I settled on headphones forever. With me playing more and more single player games on my PC now - sitting back with some nice speakers is a very appealing prospect - and it leads me down the other paths why not use Steam link to play in the living room with the proper home theatre set up?
image taken from Creative website
Why not just buy a better quality set of studio monitors and a DAC for the PC? The confusing thing is that there's so much choice in the field, even if the only choices on the surface level appear to be Logitech speakers. I tried to buck the trend, and instead, my wallet gets a little burnt.
I'll report back with regards to the warranty claim and see what happens next. The fact that this is an intermittent fault means that I don't like my chances. The Sound Blaster branding has definitely fallen from the grace and prestige it carried in the early and mid 90s.