|
Posted by
Thomas
McGuire on June 20, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
Creative
Inspire 5300 Speakers
Search
for Inspire
5300
prices.
Rather
than giving you my usual spiel on the components in my
system whenever I do a review it’s more appropriate here
to list Soundcards I tested with the Inspire 5300, those
being:
·
Hercules Game Theater XP
·
SoundBlaster Audigy
·
SoundBlaster Extigy
The
Subwoofer comes in a nice, black finished, wooden enclosure.
Wood is used as it ensures better quality Bass & less
distortion. The subwoofer is more cube shaped than previous
Creative systems have been, e.g. DTT 2500’s rectangular
Subwoofer. This seems to be the case with all the new
speakers from Creative this past 7 months or so though.
Quality-wise it was a bit of a let-down though, lacking in strength. Increasing the
bass level on the
Subwoofer alleviated some of the problem, though at that
point it started becoming 'boomy'. In this respect the
previous SW320 & DTT 2500 felt better –
producing stronger bass output at a comparatively lower
volume level and without getting this boomy. It is
perhaps worth noting that unlike the Inspire 5700’s
Subwoofer, the Inspire 5300’s doesn’t use SLAM
technology (Sorry Tom's).
The
satellite speakers have a rather distinctive look thanks to the slightly over-sized grille in front of the
driver. Remove the grille and you’ll find a throbbing 2
¼ inch or so driver (at least you will if you’re playing
something through them). The driver’s cone is made of
paper, which is fine enough & you can find plenty of
much higher-end Speakers using card too – it’s stiff
& certainly cheap, much like most other materials it’s
prone to decomposing (As mentioned in other reviews), though
this is not something you really need worry about
given the length this takes (Certainly you’ll have
replaced your speakers by then & you’d probably find
that a CPU has a shorter life-span than paper cones would
;)). The cones are surrounded by foam, which much like paper
is also fairly cheap. Then again, for sub $100 5.1 system
the use of cheaper materials shouldn’t come as too much of
a surprise for most of you.
Quality-wise the satellites are decent enough for the cost,
though when you start raising the volume, the quality does tend to suffer. It’s fine
enough up to 1/4 of the way though (This’ll depend on the
volume level you set your Soundcard too also), after which
point it tends to get more noticeably distorted. The system
also claims an SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio)
of 75dB, for what it’s worth the far more expensive
Inspire 5700 & MegaWorks 510D claims a SNR of 76dB &
95dB respectively. Basically as regards SNR the higher the
better.
|
