Unpleasant to listen to
Strengths:Not terribly expensive,
Best Buy gave me the Promedias at the price of Logitechs
Weaknesses:Bloated bass,
Aggitated highs,
relatively non-existent mid range,
poor dispersion
Posted Feb 22, 2008 - Once upon a time I wrote a publication and I had to deal with PC speakers. Logitech was always one of the more accessible companies for PR but I never cared for their speakers. Anytime they came across my desk I'd never was terribly impressed.
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Today I no longer review PC speakers for $$$ so I've lost touch with the PC audio market. When I checked out, the Klipsch Promedias were still the king of the hill. Let's face it, PC speakers are cheap. They're cheaply made, and will never challange a good ol' traditional set of speakers with a quality receiver/amplification. Now my home G5 uses floor standing JBLs but for the office I needed something compact and cheap.
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I've always respected CNET as a review site, they're generally every bit as hard nosed as I demand in a reviewer so when they tossed 9.0, I was rather impressed.
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I headed over to Best Buy and had them price match circuit city, to save $30. I took them home, tested out, what I heard wasn't the product I read about.
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The Logitech speakers by the picture looked like a classic 3-way design (tweeter, mid, sub) but instead used dipolar or Phase plug whatever, single nippilized drivers in place of tweeters. Trying to recreate a full 20Hz-20KHz range on two speakers is next to impossible. Somewhere it'll suffer. Generally quality center channels sport two-way designs and feature multiple mid sized drivers to make up for bass reproduction as two 5 1/2 drivers have roughly the surface area of a single 8 inch. However, when a single driver is forced to recreate roughly 6-7 octaves, somewhere it'll suffer. (See Bose for classic example of poor speaker design). 2-way isn't without one single strength. It eliminates the need of an extra crossover which adds to the cost and means more engineering. To properly blend a speaker over its multiple drivers so its not missing frequency ranges is an art.
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Now a lot of people get excited by the THX logo, a "quality insurance" tag that a speaker maker must submit their product to (at the cost of the maker) to see if it meets the expectations of Lucas LTD. If it does, it gets a happy THX logo to press on the box. There's a bit of payola that goes on, because of the cost means some companies will never bother with the THX review process. However generally it has been an indicator that the product at least went through some form of engineering and testing. Its better than nothing.
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The logitechs are without soul. They pack in a ridculously over bassed sub. It isn't for music lovers at all, strictly loud booming undefined bass, great for booms and bangs, but not all the complimentary to listening to a great bassline. It'll chew up your hip hop and it'll mangle your rock. Its not a bad sub, but its application seems rather one sided. The sub itself really isn't all that bad but for speakers for listening to music in the office? Nope.
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The real weak point are the satillites, no matter the positioning they sounded off. The bizarre part is they sounded fine a room over, but in the same room they were nasally and much too narrow field. Vocals sounded lacked lower mid range making for unflattering voices. The highs seemed overly expressed. All in all it made for weak presentation.
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Going back to the reviewer days, the best speakers arguably I touched were the EV SonicXSes, no longer made. Big. Ugly. Agressive horn tweeters but never the less one of the most complete speaker packages made. They were the only thing that challanged the Klipsch Promedias.
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Fast forward 5 years later to today. The Promedias are again without challange as Telex bounced out of the PC market much too fast missing the PC explosion that'd follow.
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I returned the Logitechs for the Klipsch Promedias, the same speakers I touched 5 years ago. Without question the Promedias put the Z2300s to shame with much more balanced sound, silly horn tweeters, midrange drivers and sub and all.
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Do yourself a favor, get the Promedias or try your luck for the EV SonicXSes or even more oldschool, the ACS-48s (They're still better than anything Altec Lansing has made in the past 9 years). This things are junk.
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