PC Speakers Recommendations?

I think I need new speakers. I've been using these old, cheap Logitech speakers which I think cost me $22.

Do you guys have any recommendations on good ones that are below $100. This is really just for gaming since that's really all I do on the PC.

Are you in a space that's subwoofer friendly? What audio outs are available from your motherboard or soundcard?

I've been enjoying my Logitech Surround Sound Speakers Z506 and the added immersion of 5.1 surround is rather nice.

I have space for a subwoofer. I saw those speakers. How's the wiring with the speakers behind you?

I dropped my 5.1 setup to go with the simplicity and sound quality of a two speaker setup. Part of that was for music stuff.

Best bang for buck stereo speakers are the M-Audio AV40.

Wirecutter has an article all about them and others: http://m.thewirecutter.com/reviews/b...

I run my cables to the far left of my chair (far enough they won't be accidentally rolled over) and have the rears on a small nightside drawer behind me. The room is sufficient enough not to have issues with tripping or pulling/knocking them down.

If you grab them from somewhere local with a good return policy you could always pick up a set to see if they work for you.

As Garion notes, 2.0 or 2.1 certainly work too if you don't want to be bothered dealing with the rear stuff.

I got a Razer Soundbar. Works fine for all my audio needs.

The Razer sounds nice certainly but (assuming you mean Leviathan) runs nearly double Balth's budget.

Wait for Thin_J to show up, he's done some relatively recent research.

It's been a number of years since I heard any, but in absolute terms, every set of Logitech speakers I've ever heard were sh*t. I mean, just, appallingly bad, if you have any exposure to anything vaguely good.

I don't know if you can get anything good for $100, but from personal experience, Logitech is boomy and muddy, with dismal treble. They're just awful, awful, awful.

edit: what I actually use right now is a set of 20-year-old Energy Take 2 speakers I bought new. They were once my theater setup, and have been demoted to computer duty. They're real old, and the glue on the cabinets has started to give out, but that wasn't hard to fix. And they still sound marvelous.

Speakers endure like almost nothing else you can buy. Receivers come and go, those are constantly replaced, but speakers last. If there is any product you should take your time with and shop for carefully, it's speakers, because you can keep them for literally decades. I'm at 20 years on these Energies, maybe a little more, and I see no reason why they wouldn't last another ten.

second edit: and I didn't spend that much on them at the time. I think they were about $650 for a 5.1 setup. That would be more like $1000 now.... but I'm still using them, almost every day.

I was thinking about getting a better Logitech setup. That Razer Leviathan is tempting. Refurbished ones are $150. Wondering if there are worth it.

Well, from my experience, and Thin_J will back me on this, I think, you do not want Logitech anything for sound. The products they ship are intended for people without experience with good sound; they way overdrive the bass to impress neophytes, and just do a completely crap job on the midrange and treble.

I briefly had a set of, um, I think it was Z680s, many years ago, and they are probably the single worst speakers I have ever heard. They were appalling. They had terribly recessed midrange, nasty harsh highs, and the bass went from zero to ridiculously over-strong, only going higher from there, and was totally boomy and uncontrolled. They were dismal in every area at once. They did nothing well. Nothing.

I don't know if you can get them anymore, but the Klipsch Promedias used to be decent. My big take on them was that, despite their cheap entry point, relatively speaking, they didn't suck at anything. This was high praise at that price point. The sound was unexciting, but balanced. They did a reasonable job with anything you gave them, and in computer speakers, that's damn good.

I was just about to ask about those Klipsch Promedia 2.1. They have them at Best Buy for $120. Not too bad.

Well, my experience was with the discontinued Promedia 5.1s, but at least visually, the 2.1s look pretty similar.

The 5.1s were fine. They were perfectly competent. In computer speakers, that's unusual.

I have the Genius SW-G2.1 1250 2.1 Speaker System. Does it knock your socks off? No. If you want where you can crank music and hear it all over the house, these aren't really for you. However, I think they look cool and I've had no problems with them. For sitting at my desk and gaming, these definitely fulfill the job.

Balthezor wrote:

I was just about to ask about those Klipsch Promedia 2.1. They have them at Best Buy for $120. Not too bad.

They're pretty good. My dad has them. They're not as good as most bookshelf speaker or monitor style setups like the M-audio one, but they're also a lot smaller. If you really like bass (which I generally don't), they can give you a lot of that with the sub.

Klipsch Pro Media 2.1, a little over the $100 budget ($140 Amazon, seen sales at Best Buy for around $120), but they sound great.

Personally, I wouldn't call them great. I've heard great speakers, and the Promedia 5.1s, at least, didn't qualify. But they were decent, and even decent computer speakers are very hard to find.

If you want something genuinely good, you typically want audio gear. You don't necessarily have to spend that much money, but almost anything with the 'computer sound' label is aimed at people with uneducated ears.

The ProMedia 5.1s were one of the few exceptions that I've found: they didn't suck. They were $400, and I don't know that the 2.1s are as good, but I suspect they'll also be reasonable. If they're like the 5.1s, they probably won't thrill most listeners, but they also won't turn grating or annoying after you've had them a couple weeks.

I've heard nothing but good comments about the M-Audio speakers. I was on the verge of buying a pair for my living room until we went the Sonos route instead.

For what it's worth, when I did my driving around and shopping basically every pair of powered studio monitors I listened to beat the crap out of every set of designed-for-pc use speakers I listened to. They were all significantly more clear with less noisy amps and less distortion at decent volumes. They were also all at least a bit more expensive.

The only PC specific set that sounded ok was the Promedia 2.1's. They're solid. They beat the sh*t out of everything Logitech has out. If you're going to buy a set of PC speakers and want/need to budget $150 or less for them that's IMO the only meaningful game in town. They're not going to beat a solid pair of monitors, but then they don't have to. They cost less.

So basically any studio monitors >>> Promedia 2.1's >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Everything else

With that said... all my speaker shopping is now out of date on everything except the Promedias. Those things havent changed in any meaningful way in ages. Every single model or lineup of studio monitors I looked at has been updated, changed, and revised multiple times since I did all my research and bought my M-Audio pair. My set of BX5a's is still kicking and still sounds great but even just that pair was I think at or over $200 on sale.

If you really just have to have a sub you can't get decent studio monitors and a sub for $150. And hooking up studio monitors is not the buy them bring them home and plug them in deal that the promedias will be. You have to buy a cable they almost definitely do not come with to hook them up to your PC. Each speaker will have its own power cable so you need at least one extra electric socket available to even plug them in. You need two extra if you buy a pair and add a sub later like I did, along with likely another two or three cables to chain it all together.

Each speaker, being amped individually, also has its own independent physical volume control. So to adjust volume you have basically three options.

1. Change volume on both speakers every time. Horribly inconvenient.

2. Match them and use digital volume control on the PC. Far more convenient but actually degrades audio quality in at least some small ways. The vast majority of people won't care, so this is at least a normally usable if not optimal option.

3. Buy a separate pre-amp volume control of one kind or another if you want to leave windows at 100% and use a physical knob to handle volume. My headphone amp doubles as a pre-out for the speakers so this is my chosen, and the most convenient route that doesn't sacrifice quality. It's also more money, more cables, more power plugs, and more complicated to initially set up.

I love my speaker setup as it sounds great, but I will never say it isn't entirely less convenient at least initially than just buying PC speakers and it is absolutely more expensive. Like double the cost at minimum by the time you finish.

Audio is so subjective I have a hard time pushing people to go even half as far as I did anymore.

Fwiw, the M-Audio AV40's have one volume knob for both speakers. I'm pretty sure they also came with RCA cables, but don't quote me on that. Amazon has a basic pair for $3.

The AV40's have been replaced with AV42's but reviews seem bad. The price on Amazon for the 40's keeps going up, but I see them going on eBay used for under $100.

garion333 wrote:

Fwiw, the M-Audio AV40's have one volume knob for both speakers. I'm pretty sure they also came with RCA cables, but don't quote me on that. Amazon has a basic pair for $3.

The AV40's aren't studio monitors. They're budget PC speakers that happen to be made by M-Audio. That said, they will sound very clean, so better than logitech, but will have almost no meaningful bass. They can sound a kind of empty or hollow for some things that emphasize the lower end of the sound spectrum. If you game a lot and want explosions to sound cool... the AV40's aren't going to do it.

If you want simple PC speakers on a budget that are convenient and also don't want or have the space for a sub, then yeah they're probably the choice.

But I bet if you made like 1,000 people A/B them with the Promedia's you'd end up with like 950+ people voting in favor of the Klipsch set.

Echoing what Thin_J and others have said, I attempted to replace an old Klipsch "THX" 2.1 Promedia set with a moderately priced Logitech something or other, because the volume knob just causes stupid amounts of static when twisted.

I had the new ones plugged in for about 10 minutes before I boxed the whole thing up and plugged in the Klipsch set again. The Logitech sound was so tinny and hollow as compared to the Klipsch speakers, I just couldn't take it! Next time I have some cash, I'll likely buy another set of the Promedias.

Thin_J wrote:

The AV40's aren't studio monitors. They're budget PC speakers that happen to be made by M-Audio.

Oh bummer, I should have checked. I assumed the AV40s were the low end of their powered monitors.

They market them as monitors and they are powered.

Whether or not they're real studio monitors is clearly up for discussion.

The Logitech sound was so tinny and hollow as compared to the Klipsch speakers, I just couldn't take it!

Logitech takes advantage of people who don't know what good audio should sound like. The Z680s, for example, were absolutely the worst speakers I have ever auditioned. "Dismal" doesn't even begin to cover it. They were execrable. The entire Logitech audio department should have been fired for shipping that crap and calling them speakers.

I've never heard the Promedia 2.1s, but those old 5.1s were decent. Like I said, they're not going to knock anyone's socks off (if you've heard a quality pair of $1K floorstanders that are actually worth $1K, the Promedias aren't going to keep up), but they're competent. They don't suck, and that's kind of a big deal in computer audio. They're perfectly decent little speakers, and will stay very listenable for many years.

edit: and, as Thin_J is pointing out, they're pretty low-hassle, mostly just plugging them in and going.

If you want really good computer sound, a receiver and real speakers can work marvelously. I haven't heard a set in, god, it's been like eight years, but at one time, the Onkyo HTIBs were quite good. There was an $800 setup in a local hhgregg that sounded damn good in the store, at least. The styling sucked; they looked cheap and nasty. But, man, they sounded excellent.

Note that you'll also want a good set of analog outs if you're going this route; the better Realtek motherboard sound is very high quality. The typical crap DACs like the ALC892 are only tolerable, but the good ones, like the older ALC889 or its replacement, the ALC898, sounded fairly amazing.

You can get stellar sound out of a computer, if you want it. You don't have to spend a mint, but you want to get into cheap audio gear, and stay way far away from anything with the 'computer sound' label on it, with the sole exception of the Klipsch Promedias.

several edits later: it's also worth pointing out that Thin_J was trying to save money, and ended up spending a bunch more than expected, and ended up with a complex, fiddly solution. If you do it right up front, and go with a receiver and outboard speakers, it may not even cost that much more than his setup, and it'll be a lot easier. Among other things, you get a remote control.

I've never heard them, but the Fluance speakers are supposed to be pretty good.

Oh, and yet another thought: it's getting harder to find receivers with multichannel analog inputs. You may have to buy one used. Otherwise, you have to route through HDMI sound, which is fine, but then you're limited to HDMI resolutions.

That's been a real problem for me, since I went 2560x1600 about ten years ago, and it's only in the last year or so that this resolution has been possible via HDMI.

garion333 wrote:

They market them as monitors and they are powered.

Whether or not they're real studio monitors is clearly up for discussion.

They share an amp. One amp inside one speaker that splits out to the other one has always been standard PC speaker system design.

When I talk about studio monitors I am talking about actual powered monitors. Not one self powered and one passive that are paired.

Passive monitors do exist but have a tendency to be more expensive at the same audio quality levels.

If you're going to go passive, Malor's recommendation for just a receiver and standard loudspeakers is the better route. There are sets designed for nearfield listening that should work fine. I think JBL sells a well regarded model.

For the record, I just discovered that the problem with my Klipsch model might be fixed with a replacement control pod (available from them directly, but currently on backorder).

If successful. I will likely not need new speakers for another 6 years!

Cool!

FWIW, I've also seen threads in multiple places with essentially step by step guides on how to repair the amp inside the sub if it ever goes out, so if that happens there's a cheap route to fix that too as long as you have or have access to a soldering iron

Yeah, if it's the Promedias, they're worth fixing. I have no idea how good the electronics are, but the speakers themselves, AFAIK, could last another fifteen years.