5.1 speaker recommendations for under $200 Canadian

A

Armpit

Gawd
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Sep 1, 2002
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I'm thinking of changing my speakers to 5.1 setup, I was thinking of Logitech's Z-5300 which are currently on sale for $199 and I have a $20 coupon from futureshop. Is this a good choice? I'd use them with my SB Live! 5.1.
 
Who calls the z5300 crappy?!

That quite a nice set of speakers, and probably more than 99% of us need.

Those will sound great with pretty much anything. Hopefully you have a Revo 7.1 or an Audigy or something higher grade to plug them in to.

Personally I just picked up some Logitech Z-640s and were very disappointed in them (either the set I picked up was borked or sub is supposed to get it's signal from the fronts, it wasn't operating as a discrete channels sub in 5.1 mode.) So picked up a Creative Inspire T5400s and was pleasantly supprised with the results. I don't usually go for Creative products but I found these to be highly acceptable sound for $100 CDN.

So you don't even have to go as high as the Logitech Z-5300s to get good sound. If you are really serious grab the Z-680s, or the Kllipsh <sp?> 5.1s, they are both really wonderful. I couldn't justify it though. Especially when decent 5.1 sound is so cheap.

It's kinda funny. "Low-end" sound is now on board 5.1 6 channel analog discrete, with a $100 set of speakers. The fairly HQ sound coming out of my AD1980 Soundmax solution on the motherboard is competative with the SBLive I paid $150 for only a few years ago. Actually, both the sound chips and the speakers are 10x better than anything that was offered just a few years ago.

It's a good time to be a gamer!
 
It sucks that future shop changed policy... I had to go around to 6 or 7 to get my z680's for $370. In the end I got them.... but with the optical cable and extended warranty, it came out to be about the same as the original price. :confused:

Oh well...

Also, as an alternative, check out z560's which can be had from Canada Computers for $146.
 
vodkajello said:
Personally I just picked up some Logitech Z-640s and were very disappointed in them (either the set I picked up was borked or sub is supposed to get it's signal from the fronts, it wasn't operating as a discrete channels sub in 5.1 mode.) So picked up a Creative Inspire T5400s and was pleasantly supprised with the results. I don't usually go for Creative products but I found these to be highly acceptable sound for $100 CDN.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, what kind of sound hardware were you running these off of ?

I had the same problem with my Altec Lansing 251s running off of a Soundstorm board, and I discovered that the board has issues with swapping the Centre/LFE channels. So the center comes out of the subwoofer, and the subwoofer signals come out of the centre.

There's a utility on nVidia's site called nVswap which can deal with this problem (if you have an nVidia board). If you have something else, look for a similar utility for that hardware.
 
I'm running my onboard AD 1980 Soundmax for sound. I know about the Centre/LFE thing. There is an adjustment in the Windows sound mixer to switch the polarity of the plug. It didn't help.

I don't think the Z-640s are real 5.1. At least the set I had wasn't. I was clearly not running the sub from the LFE channel. The LFE mixer bar and mute did nothing. There was bass no matter what. It operated just like the Z-540s, which dedrive base from the other channels and don't have a good (or none at all) crossover so you get boomy sound.

These T5400s from Creative are a way better set.

I fairly sure my 640s were defective. There is no way the community raves about them with the kind of performance I got out of them.
 
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