Logitech Z5500 Digital PC Multimedia Home Theatre Speaker System - 505 Watt (Total)

There's no denying how great this system looks and how fantastic it sounds. Any of the other reviews will tell you that.
I didn't buy this to compliment my desktop pc. I bought it to be central to my bedroom home cinema experience.
With that purpose in mind, there are a few things to mindful of before parting with your hard earned cash, but it's worth pointing out that these same niggles could be true of almost all 'desktop sound systems' if you try to use them as a 'small scale' home cinema system.
Firstly, as you would have read before, the sub is huge. I considered this before buying, but it's only when you get it out of the box you can truly appreciate how huge. You then have the dilemma of where to put it.
You are restricted in your choices by the fact that the sub must be at least 60cm away from other electrical equipment to avoid interference/damage but can be no more than 2 metres away from the Sound Touch control centre (the box with the volume knob on).
This also then gives you the potential problem of where to site the Sound Touch control centre.
The satellite speakers seem to be very directional. That is to say, if you point them directly at you, you get pin sharp crystal clear sound with plenty of top end. If they're not pointing directly at you, you do loose a bit of clarity and top end. This is only noticeable however if you keep comparing the two. I don't have them pointing directly at me and I am still very happy with the sound.
This brings me on to the next consideration.
The speakers are wall mountable, but you cannot angle them point to where you want. You are stuck with where they want to point. This clearly highlights my point above even more.
A final word of caution is this...
At the centre of my set up is my windows media center. Something of extreme annoyance is the fact that on my system some of the buttons on the remote control for the Logitech have undesirable effects on my media center. For example, if I press the volume down button on the Logitech, it is the equivalent of pressing the back button on the MCE remote. More of a problem is pressing the input source on the Logitech remote to 'coaxial' (which is how my MCE is connected to it). When I press this button it shuts down my MCE PC! How annoying is that!
I've done a quick bit of googling into this and found no-one else with this problem yet, so this could just be me, but worth you noting.

I of course give this five stars, as it is well deserved. I hope you haven't found my review negative as there are many, many positives about this system. But you can of course read those on every other review on this site. I wanted to give you some information that perhaps isn't mentioned at all or at least very often.

Final word.
I'm really pleased I bought this system, despite the few annoyances I have with it, I certainly wouldn't give it back!
Playing XBOX360 through it is just brilliant!

This is a fine sound system. You'll see from reviews that from time to time the fuse located in the subwoofer will blow. I see from the reviews, that some folks think the system is dead or faulty. Don't worry about this - any decent sized system - whether it's "consumer audio" or the bass system in a pro kit for live performance - has an easily accessible fuse. Why so easily accessible? Because they blow, often, if you power up with the volume up (hear that 'thump'?). Buy a pack of fuses (e.g. Maplin - they are about 20p each - get 10 - you want 20mm A/S 2A - order code GL62S). Then, look after the thing: when done, turn down the volume of the sytem to zero, before turning off the power. That way, when you turn it on again, it stays alive. Why isn't this in the instruction leaflet? And if you forgot to do that volume down before powering off thing (again), use one of your fuses from the pack! I think the system is very good value - particularly as a partner to - say - an xbox streaming media for home cinema type purposes. Great detail, excellent bass - I guess you'd have to spend 5 times more to hear a real difference in quality. Remarkable.

I took delivery of my Z5500's today. Having read other people's reviews, I was expecting them to large. However, they are huge. The control unit is over 20cm tall and is now dominating my desk.

Setup was reasonably straight forward, and I had them working with the analogue input very easily. However, getting the speakers to use the digital connection on my soundcard was quite tricky and counter-intuitive. I have a SoundBlaster 5.1 Digital card. This is how to connect them:

1) Buy a 3.5mm to Coax connector (£1.99) and a coax cable (2 metres should be plenty, depending on where you want the control unit in relation to your PC)

2) Connect the coax cable into the back of the control unit and the 'Digital Out' jack on the soundcard.

3) Go into the 'Creative Surround Mixer' and select "Digital Output Only", Disable "AC-3 Decode" (you want the speakers to do the decoding) and then select "2 speakers" (Weird, I know. But it works)

4) In your DVD software (e.g. Windows Media Player, Power DVD, etc) you need to select SPDIF

Now the soundcard should pass the signal straight through to the Logitech Z5500's for processing and you should get true 5.1 sound.

Anyway, back to the speakers....

I watched 'Master & Commander - Far Side of the World' to test them out. Wow! Dolby Digital is crystal clear, loud and totally distortion free. There are loads of different audio settings - music and TV sound great using 'Coax Stereo x 2' (this setting uses the sub, front and rear speakers to playback 2 channel audio).

If you're planning on using these speakers to play games, please be aware that you'll have to use the analogue connectors unless your soundcard is capable of Dolby Digital Live (no Creative soundcards can do DDL).

These speakers are amazing. I think they're easily worth the money and I can't imagine wanting to replace them.

Buy them, you won't regret it.