Gadgetory

alright guys if you followed - tech tips for any sort of extended period of time you probably know that I'm a bit of an audio geek so this is something that I am extremely excited about this is the brand new SP 2500 from Corsair it is from their gaming audio series which normally I would sort of turn my nose up to and I'd say blog gaming audio that just means it's not very good and so they marketed to gamers who don't know better no offense to any of our gamers in the audience but Corsair has taken a completely different approach to this particular set of gaming audio speakers this is a 2.1 set up and they have aimed to build the best overall speaker setup that they can in the price range that gamers can still afford so why don't we find one side of this box or other that has some specifications on it that I can show you and we'll go through what course there has to say for themselves about this setup so first thing over here we see that Corsair has a 2 year warranty on it of course there's warranty is legendary in this industry so you can pretty much believe that they're going to stand behind it for as long as they say all right specifications frequency responses from 35 Hertz to 20 kilohertz plus or minus 3 decibels okay 220 watts total power that is measured via FTC RMS so that what is that root means squared or something along those lines which means that it can do this for days at a time your speaker system not the one that they've submitted for rating ok not for two minutes at a time not for one musical note at a time can do it for days at a time every single one all right subwoofer dimensions satellite dimensions you can read those if you want the subwoofer is an 8-inch 120 watt subwoofer with durable rubber surround okay so it's a bridged dual 60 watt classic you have bridge okay so dual amplifier so this speaker system actually uses a dual amp design which means that you have one amp that drives the larger speaker on your satellite and then you have one amp that drives the tweeter on your satellites so I'll show you guys that when I actually take it out of the box you've got an ultra-efficient integral power supply with universal input so imagine that Corsair building something with a good quality power supply in it go figure satellites are by amplified as I mentioned before two-way design with detachable audio cables 3-inch 40 watt mid-range drivers and one-inch 40 watt ferrofluid cooled silk diaphragm tweeters so those are the ones that I was mentioning before are independently amplified 50 watts per satellite measured via this method the reviewers guide for this actually mentions this a lot it is incredibly important because you can build a 1,000 watt speaker setup that basically just sounds like noise because it's not because all the sound is just being corrupted ok so PC input on the subwoofer do ok you can read all this if you want I suppose oh oh this is kind of actually we'll talk about headphone mouna devoted a bit mod X theatrical audio processing for blu-ray and DVD audio that recreates the theater experience that's kind of neat ok so why don't we go ahead and start getting this out of the box and I am going to refer to my cheat sheet here because the reviewers guide is that long and it's actually chock full of good information I have read through it a couple times but I cannot necessarily be expected to remember every little thing every time I am human sorry guys ok so here in terms of included audio cables we have one little headphone jack straight pass-through okay then we have two power cables so those are using imagine that a PC company goes and uses 4 pin CPU power connectors ok and then we have an RCA cable just like that ok we have a power cord standard PC power cord no it isn't look at that it's a 2 prong one so there's no ground on this guy I guess you probably could use a grounded cable it just wouldn't be good to be grounding out via that third prong so we're packed using environmentally friendly how environmentally friendly cardboard packaging love to see that I'm just going to start taking this stuff out here and that is the subwoofer for that thing's big oh here we go those documentation so let's see what we have in terms of documents that course they are going to tell us how to use it so stop do not return this to the store this is a QuickStart guide so the QuickStart guide is like this thick hopefully there are a few different languages in there so they show us what's in the box how to use the desktop controller how to make all the necessary connections here's some tips for the best sound there's tip number one use a high-quality sound card BAM so yes please please do not forget to use a high-quality sound card and there you go that's the English part so it looks like it's probably in about eight languages or so some safety information which you should read but I'm not going to because I'm actually not plugging it in just yet got some more packaging materials here file that behind me something in here okay this is what unboxing is all about right guys having this experience so here I've got a couple of speaker stands I think is what these are but there's only one way to find out for sure and that is to just try things until something fits okay so these have little rubber feet on them so we'll go ahead and put those aside for now and then we have our control pod I'm a big fan of control pods for desktop PC speaker systems generally gives you a lot of control this one actually has a bunch of different modes that you can use in order to optimize it for the kind of content you're listening to you can turn on the mod X mode which is great for some movies etc you can actually turn on a headphone mode which is optimized for action believe it or not it's optimized for low quality headphones because Corsair like myself recognizes that most of the gaming audio products out there are just code name for low quality so their headphone mode on their speakers is actually designed to compensate for low quality gaming headphones so check that up everything on this one so we'll go ahead and take out one of the satellites here I'll show you guys this there we are so it's pretty heavy actually not like super heavy like my caps at home but feels feels built anyway it's a very very plane look what we've pretty much come to expect from Corsair so here we are there's your power for the tweeter your power for the mid-range and they show you that this is the left speaker so there's your power input and then around on the other side we find not a whole lot to speak of down on the bottom we see four rubber feet and I'm let me just see what these are difficult like this that doesn't make any sense there's the picture huh we'll figure these out in a bit okay so there's one of the tweeters or rotten one of the tweeters one of the satellites rather so here we'll grab the other one and then we'll pull out all of this packing material so we can get access to the stuff over I'll never be able to pack this back together thankfully I don't have to okay so here's the sub and we'll go ahead and move box make the camera net and once I've got the whole thing on box I'm actually going to take a little bit of time and I'm going to go through my cheat sheet with you guys and tell you some of the more interesting things that I learned about this speaker setup when I was reading through it this is different I had kind of expected this to go from front to back a long way okay so here is the front of our subwoofer you can see you've got a nice little coarser logo here you've got your port here okay the overall finish is the like the the rubberized sort of texture that we saw before camera man's gone ahead and putting his iPhone 4 on the subwoofer for scale so that's how large the sub is and actually why don't I go ahead and put one of the satellites on there as well just so you can see for comparison what it will look like on your desk okay so there's the iPhone so let's go ahead and move around to the side go ahead and show you guys what it looks like from this side so very very very plain what you'd expect from a quality piece of audio equipment it shouldn't really stand out it should be all about the sound it makes not the appearance of it so here you can see we've got our power input over here on the left along with a bunch of warnings and certifications and all that good stuff then we have course there's part number here and then we've got all the business ends side of things so we have our remote so that's the here we go the control pod just plugs in like this okay that's pretty straightforward next we have our satellites power okay so those plug in just like that they are color-coded and it looks like yep they only go in one way so there's your right and then your left goes in much the same way all right the other connectivity we have down here is our line in so you can see we have our left and right and then an auxilary input so that's pretty straightforward and you can see that we have not only the auxilary one here but we also have our auxilary two input the back of the control pod as well as a USB connection so I'll be back in just a minute so I'm totally going to cheat a little bit because it's an awful lot to remember there's lots of charts and diagrams so we'll go through some of this together but I'm going to show you some of the stuff that Corsair has to say for themselves in their reviewers guide so I already mentioned the bio amplified satellite speakers oh we did find out what these are for so these are stands you do want to ensure for the best possible stereo experience that the satellites are mostly pointed at you so that means if you're sitting at a desk and your desk is kind of below you you would want to position these under the front two feet of the speakers in order to have them pointed more at your ears and rather than at your chest so that is the reason that they've gone ahead and included that okay studio quality digital crossovers so this is a good thing to talk about a little bit I'll let cameraman sort of check out the speakers while I drone on over here oh actually no first thing this has a 1.8 inch TFT colour display readable in daylight or at night so I'll go ahead and make sure that you rub so I'll go ahead and make sure that I show you guys what this looks like and one of my follow up videos for this the speaker set okay ah studio quality digital crossovers so you know what I'd really recommend going ahead and reading one of the online reviews about this if you want to read all of this but basically what it means is that you are going to have a more you're going to have a much finer control over what part of your audio signal gets played through the subwoofer what part gets played through the mid speakers and what part gets played through the tweeters that's pretty much what it means okay technical overview they're basically saying that their subwoofer uses a fourth-order bandpass design rather than a simpler ported bass reflex did I say bass no I said bandpass good rather than a simpler ported bass reflex subwoofer so these two diagrams you know what I'm not an audio engineer I don't know the benefits of that design but it's definitely worth mentioning to you guys in case you do know the difference they talked about I don't know if they can see that so they talk an awful lot about why using the FTC standard for power output matters and I'm going to summarize a couple pages in the reviewers guide as well it means that it can provide that power over an extended period of time it also means that that power is going to be balanced between the different parts of the speaker system because you could buy a 500 watt speaker system that has a 450 watt subwoofer in 225 watt satellites and it's going to provide a very unsatisfactory listening experience if you're doing anything other than listening to explosions so that's why that is important you have a late night mode which I should have mentioned before but what it does is it just adjust the prosper crossover point so that the satellites are going to play more of your base than the subwoofer which means that you're not going to bother your neighbors late at night headphone processing mode I mentioned before the mod X processing is for making it sound more like a theater and courser really recommends there they're not going to go ahead and say that yeah this is the be-all and end-all it's that simple they're just saying you have this option you can try it out if you like it great it'll sound great with certain movies bad with others but that's fine that's life they've given you a lot of different modes to play with it also has a karaoke mode which applies processing that attempts to remove or significantly reduce the vocals which is pretty neat maybe I'll do like a karaoke video these speakers to show off that particular little feature and they've got a bunch of other equalizer presets as well pop jazz FPS app so let's talk about what the SP 2500 is designed for it is designed to be listened to a close range so it's not really for your living room it's for computer okay that's one thing second of all it is designed to be used with a sweet spot so if you have multiple listeners this is not marketed as you know a 360-degree field of listening or anything like that it has a sweet spot which really any speaker system does and that is designed to be right where your head is so that's why they include the stands that's why they include two speakers you aim them at your head you want to create a sweet spot you've got to play around a little bit to find out where it is I won't think the next here is why doesn't it have a digital input well it's completely unnecessary so I think that covers pretty much everything I want to save up the SP 2500 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other videos