Premium Two-Channel PC Speaker Roundup
It’s time to focus on basic PC audio with a two-channel speaker roundup. We look at the Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass FX3022, Bowers & Wilkins MM-1, Creative Gigaworks T40 Series II, and M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 to see what these systems can offer.
Test Setup And Benchmarks
Most PC speaker reviews are limited to subjective opinions. While those are quite useful, this is Tom’s Hardware. We’re going to try to go a little deeper than that with some objective measurements, too.
Our measurements are taken with a calibrated Apex 220 measurement microphone, with phantom power supplied by TubeMP preamp. The measurement software we’re using is TrueRTA audio spectrum analyzer level 4, found at www.trueaudio.com. Testing is done in a 25’x15’ room with the microphone pointed upward 25” from the speaker satellites. Only one satellite is used for testing to minimize phase cancellation.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Mini-ITX Half-Height Build |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Phenom II X4 705e2.5 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache, 65 W TDP |
| Motherboard | Asus M4A88T-I Deluxe Socket AM3 Chipset: AMD 880G, BIOS 0410 |
| Networking | Onboard Gigabit LAN controller |
| Memory | Mushkin PC3 10700 SO-DIMM 2 x 2048 MB, 1333 MT/s, CL 9-9-9-24-1T |
| Graphics | Radeon HD 5570 Reference650 MHz GPU, 512 MB DDR3 at 900 MHz |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 750 GB 7200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3.0Gb/s |
| Power | In-Win IP-AD120-2 160 W (included with case) |
| Audio | Realtek ALC889High-Definition Audio Codec |
| Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 x64 |
| DirectX version | DirectX 11 |
| Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 10.11 |
Current page: Test Setup And Benchmarks
Prev Page M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 Next Page Objective Benchmarks: Frequency ResponseGet Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.