Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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77 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great bit of kit, but things to be aware of., 5 Jul 2007
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!
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome sound, 28 Dec 2006
These speakers arrived today and we have just set them up now. All I can say is WHOOOOOOOOOOOA!!! These are truly terrific. We bought them as a surround sound for a DVD player. In the past we have used a DVD home cinema kit you know the all in one box set things you get from comet. These are fine until your DVD starts playing up (We have gone through two of these kits in 2 years) and it is a pain to pull the carpet up and re-thread all the wires again. We wanted a more long term solution so we decided on seperates. We bought these speakers based on price and the terrific reviews on here and I now want to add to that praise.
We plugged the speakers into a new DVD player and the sound blows you away. It is so loud (Thank God for a detached house) and you can hear every inch of sound so clearly. No muffles in speech and you can feel the bass inside your body it is so terrific. We tried it out on the two sound greats. Star wars and Lord of the rings and never before even with my old decent sony home cinema kit have I heard the films like this before. It is actually like being there inside the action yourself. They are also very easy to set up even if it does involve pulling your carpet up. But at least now when the DVD dies as they seem to do in this house I can just buy another and re-use these great speakers for years to come.
They at under £200 a total bargain as well when you think a decent Denon home cinema is more like £700+. These IMO are just as good if not better than that.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Speakers, 18 April 2006
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.
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