If you are too impatient to read my philosphical setup for the actual review, scoll down to the image and start there. Otherwise, carry on....
Speakers are something we all take for granted. They're everywhere these days, for better or worse. Due to that fact, we have all been conditioned to unflinchingly accept sound waves coming at us through terrible tv speakers, cheap headphones, flat car speakers, and the worse-than-atrocious things they put in cell phones. I must admit that I fit the average here, which is rather strange since I am such a music lover. My taste in music spans almost every genre, with my deepest appreciation being reserved for music that is moving to the soul. Such music is often woven from numerous instruments and sound sources, or sung by people with amazing voices and equally amazing lyrics. I'll be doing a review soon of one of these, but on to my point.
Over the years, I have settled for any way possible to get sound to my ears. I have been willing to listen to music over the little speakers built into the Nintendo DS, over baby monitors, with FM static, and on free(for a reason) computer speakers. I have still enjoyed my music despite the flat mid-range that all the highs and lows of the songs have been smashed into. I'm easy like that. I had one such set of speakers in my entertainment center for a long while, a set of 2.1 Juster speakers that someone had given me after I fixed a computer for them. I thought they sounded okay, but eventually the "crackle" while adjusting the volume was grating on my nerves and I started looking around for a better, but still cheap, set of 2.1 speakers to replace them.
Roughly 9 months ago, I started the quest in earnest. I decided I wanted to stay in the $50 price range since we have a need to be frugal in all "amenities". I began watching sale ads for the local electronics dealers and doing a weekly browse through several of my geek shopping sites. Very often, I'd see a set of speakers in the price range and I would go check reviews of them on newegg.com, amazon.com, and circuitcity.com. Every time, the speakers got wildly mixed reviews, but it was obvious enough that they were not well built or sounded terrible. I would sigh in dejection as I continued my quest.
A few weeks ago, Circuit City was selling the Creative I-Trigue 3400 2.1 Speakers for $49.99 after Mail-In-Rebates. In the past, I have had a 100% track record with Circuit City Rebates, so I started looking for reviews. Oddly enough, there were not many out there, but the few I found were overwhelmingly positive sans one by a person whose review was so discrepant that he either had a damaged pair or had issues with his setup in Windows. I decided to bite the bullet and headed down to pick up a pair.
For more info on the Tech Specs, click the image above to see their page.Setup took a while because our entertainment center is actually a 5ft. tall computer hutch with closing doors, occuppied by a Mac mini and a 17" Sony Trinitron as the "heart" of our entertainment needs. This is not ideal for movie watching, but we mostly listen to music anyway. The Bass Sub fits almost exactly into the cubby hole at the bottom of the hutch, and the speakers are standing in the back corners of the area for the monitor, with roughly 6" of separation from the walls of the hutch. These speakers come with a volume knob that is separate from the speakers which works perfectly for our setup because we have it tucked into one of the top cubby holes where little ones cannot reach it. The cables were all long enough for this scenario and I am extremely happy with the volume knob.
With everything in place, I decided to test them with the most worthy of tests: "Dark Island" from Mike Oldfield's album "Voyager". I was struck to silence. It was as if this was the first time I had ever listened to the song. Mike Oldfield has numerous layers in this song and I was hearing things I had never heard before. After fiddling with the Bass setting and volume for a moment, I backed up a few feet and stood in awe. I could literally feel the music. I could feel the Bass, and the 3 individual speakers in the satellite caused a spatial separation between the highs, mids, and lows that made me feel like I was listening to the music in a live studio, where the instruments would have been coming from different places, and at different strengths. I could not believe how amazing these speakers sounded.
Excited, I grabbed the mouse and started scrolling through the iTunes Library for some other songs that would be good tests. I wanted to hear some vocals, so I headed to Sarah McLaughlin's "Silent Night". I was now grinning from ear to ear as I felt the harmony voices coming at me from separate spatial locations, and could hear every emotional waver of her voice. Again, I had never heard music this way through speakers before and it gave a very live feel to the experience. I tried some Michelle Tumes, Leigh Nash and Dan Haseltine, Jars of Clay, and Marc Cohn. I was so excited at all the nuances I was discovering for the first time in songs I had listened to hundreds or thousands of times before, that I just wanted to go through and listen to every song in our collection all over again.
I went into the kitchen and told Mary Beth, "You have to hear this." She came in and we started going through some more of our favorites, both in awe and noticing things we'd never heard before. We ended up standing there almost an hour doing this. For the finale, I put on Marc Cohn's "Ellis Island", and we heard this amazing song in an even more amazing way than ever before. Over these speakers, we could feel the emotion in his voice more powerfully than we ever had before.
I now understand why audio snobs are audio snobs. After using these speakers, I do not think I will ever be able to buy another cheap set of speakers again. I only paid $50 for these, but now that I've heard them, I'd willingly pay $200 if I had to. Yes, they are that good.
If you read the synopsis on their page, they discuss the technical reasons for this sound quality, and I can tell you it is not just marketing. The titanium microdrivers make all the difference in the world. As I said, they do such a great job with the separation of highs, mids, and lows, that it creates a more live feel to the music and different instruments have different intensities at which the waves hit you, causing you to distinguish them clearly as separate instruments, and also to distinguish the different strengths of the instruments in the mix.
There are some great practical advantages to this speaker set as well. I really like the feel of the big volume knob on the control, and the Bass setting is a smaller knob on the side of the unit so that you are unlikely to accidentally change the Bass once you get it the way you want it. The other features of the control are the headphone jack, which I haven't used yet, and the Line In jack. This feature is fabulous if you have friends you like to trade recommendations with. Now, if a friend comes over with an iPod and wants to play a song for me, it is easy to just plug it into the jack on the front of the controller and play it through the speakers. The convenience of this is superb. Interestingly enough, when you plug something in, it does not override the audio from the main connection, but mixes the 2. So, if there is music playing on the mini, I have to at least pause it before playing the external device. This is not a problem, but it is not what one would normally expect. I tested the Audio In jack with my Nintendo DS and it sounded great.
So, in closing, if you have never listened to your music on a set of real speakers, you owe it to yourself to go out and buy a set of these and reserve a few hours to listen to your music collection for the first time all over again.
At the time of this writing, the cheapest place I could find a set was at Directron for $83. They are definitely worth that price. You can also buy them directly from Creative's site. If they are unavailable at the time of your reading this, I would recommend buying one of the other models that use the NeoTitanium Tri-Array[tm] Technology, as I believe that is what makes these speakers so incredibly good.
