lalaslands

With a price tag of around a hundred dollars, these speakers beat similar models from Bose and Logitech. Yamaha may not be well known when it comes to computer speakers, but they are no strangers when it comes to speakers in general, and you can tell they didn't cut any corners when it comes to engineering and design. The sound is very subjective, so I won't go into detail here. I will only say that despite a small hole in each cabinet (the top is just for porting), the sound is quite detailed and does not suffer from artificial amplification. Although the small baffle can't go very deep, the Yamaha doesn't sound like Bose, who use huge ports and internal wiring to get muddy bass from small speakers. Instead, the sound is naturally attenuated while maintaining clarity in the mids and highs. If you want speakers that rumble and let you "hear" explosions, buy a 2.1 system. Some reviewers complained about distortion at higher volumes. I don't know what room they were used in or what the source of the noise was, but from a Lenovo laptop in a small office/bedroom, they are pretty loud. Perhaps in a larger room (say, with a TV in the family room) they are too weak. It's only 7W per channel, so people need to keep their expectations in check. For close listening, i.e. desktop/laptop, you will find that they are quite loud even at half power. I haven't had a chance to mix the two inputs yet. To be honest, I'm not sure what the application of this is - perhaps if you had a pair of mics and were doing a live Q&A session? Build quality seems reasonable for this price range. There are no unsightly fabric speaker grilles, and the buttons + knobs work smoothly. Again, for $100, the design is at least as good as the competition. I'm not sure why the speaker cable is wired, as it limits flexibility/repair later, but that probably won't matter to most people. I ended up returning them to buy something with bigger drivers (read: more bass). However, if someone asked me to recommend a desktop/laptop speaker that wasn't expensive, I'd probably recommend these. Yamaha prefers clean, accurate sound, not fake bass extension. I just found TheSoundExperts. I want to say that it has some really great articles about bookshelf speakers, you may want to check it out.