Gadgetory

today I'm going to be unboxing something that is of interest to me and absolutely nobody else this is the legendary spear X Xbox 5.1 surround sound system it is no longer available but as you can see by the very old and very beat-up box I managed to find one in our warehouse and I bought it because I happen to need some speakers I'm planning to move my cat speakers that are on my computer over to my TV and so I needed something for my computer and since it has a digital input I can make use of this so in terms of the overall specs and features why don't we go over what's on the front here so we have five omni polar satellite speakers so these use a pretty cool technology that actually only sends some of the sound directly to your ears the rest of it it bounces so you actually hear it indirectly off the walls and off the the obstacles in the room and the theory and from what I've heard it works really well is that it sounds much more natural that way all right we have a powered eight inch subwoofer which uses some kind of other technology to produce sounds that are as far as your perception goes much lower frequency than what an eight inch subwoofer can normally do we have a 300 watt RMS digital six channel amplifier so like I said digital which means optical input and I don't believe it accepts any analog input at all other than no it does it does it accepts like RCA cables or something so nothing from a computer and certainly nothing 5.1 it has a headphone output which is handy USB connectivity future expansion capability yeah I don't think that's going to be happening based on how I would have production all of this stuff is aa remote control and IR receiver included I'll speaker wearing included yeah like check this out the warranty is also penned out on the box awesome so I don't think I'll be getting any kind of warranty support on this whatsoever and here actually here's something else that's on the outside of the box a little bit more detail about these speakers so it creates a much larger sweet spot rather than having a very very narrow place where the where the listening position is optimal so inside we find a bilingual setup guide the papers fill white so it's uh it's not battled I guess you guys should have seen how gusty this was when I when I first opened it up all right we've got speaker cables which I will meet so one end is terminated in oh these are both ends are terminated in RCA cables so we have how many of those five of those so there's the five cables now they're kind of thin gauge but reasonably flexible so should be should be not too bad it looks like there's two longer ones and then three shorter ones so that would be for the front channels from the rear channels okay next you've got a packing foam and then we find the speakers so like I said these are really old like I think this is it several years old this inventory it was so dusty when I found it but they are in brand-new condition so I will show you guys one of the satellites I'm not gonna bother unboxing them all because they're identical to each other I just want to show you guys the speaker design now I don't know you know speaker engineer but I can try and explain the basic principles and show you guys sort of what I meant before so if I could get it out of the bag I mean okay here we go so that's the front of the speaker so you can see there's a here I hope you can see I think this comes off yeah there we go okay so that's the front of the speaker so the way it's designed it actually reflects the sound off of this kind of cone shaped dome shaped thing and it reflects the right amount of sound directly at you and the rest of it out to the walls so that proportionally you hear I think it's something like 70% directly and 30% reflected at you by your surroundings and you can see there's another dome right there for the tweeter so that's also reflecting that sound towards you and also at the wall so actually here the speaker itself has a nice like if you don't mind the Xbox branding I've heard they're just great speakers although I haven't had a chance to listen yet so we've got a removable grill there then just the speaker's themselves okay on the bottom we've got screwing for a stand as well as no wonder what that can be used for hard to say but there's our connection for the audio cable all right so there's one speaker let's see what else we've got in here in terms of accessories so actually haven't quite decided if these ones are going to end up downstairs or if these ones I learned that Bob stares and I move the receiver and Kev speakers downstairs I guess it depends on how everything sounds what looks better not sure I bought these on a recommendation so I'll have to kind of play around with them myself and see what I think before I make any decisions but this looks like some more accessories and whatnots here we find an optical audio cable noodles certified gaming gear okay cool next we find yes the front control pod oh okay doesn't seem to have any controls on it just is a dislocated display in an infrared receiver so you actually have to control these with the remote they don't have any buttons right on the front so there you go you can see all the stuff that says on there there's a bunch of certifications Dolby Digital Pro Logic 2 DTS surround Texas Instruments of all things on the top here alright you know what I'm going to turn these lights around something you guys can actually see what I'm doing a little better down here there we go maybe that will help alright next we've got kind of what looks like kind of an s-video cable but it's probably some proprietary thing from the control pot yeah so that plugs into the full pot and then presumably the stop and AM next we've got okay so that's just a coaxial digital cable which is just like any other coaxial cable and then we have this is for using with your computer if you only want to use to channel sound I'm guessing a lot Mix 35.1 if you want to go that route and then finally we have the Xbox remote you know it's too bad that products like this are kind of dying out like stuff that's designed for gamers but actually delivers excellent sound quality like we used to have so many options you know creative flinch monsoon if you want to go back a little bit further than that you know you've got companies like this doing stuff and now we just have I here's a couple double-a batteries these are probably like expired let me see if there's a expiry date on them but they the cold hard reality that I've come to face is that gamers don't know the difference between good audio and loud audio and they aren't willing to pay for it so that's why we see products like this just go Yoel Razer Mako is another another great example of just a phenomenal set of speakers that was marketed at gamers but actually it was just a really neat audio set but wasn't successful because people weren't willing to pay the premium for something that's truly well made and sounds really good in everything not just you know boom games so I'm trying to get this sub open alright the Xbox branding I have to admit is a bit of a bit of a turn-off because it's kind of like that so weird-looking style and it's actually designed to match the old original Xbox not an Xbox 360 ok so here we go try to clear some room here so there's this up kind of got your standard audio equipment finish on it ok comes with these little silver legs that are gonna lift it up off the ground a little bit so that as you can see if I tip it a little bit further the 8-inch subwoofer down here will have a little bit of room between itself on the ground alright I'm gonna turn it around show you guys in the back ok here we go so we've got our power switch got a fuse here ok cool then we've also got the infrared receiver in USB in I don't think this does anything I think it was one of those for future expansion things but this product disappeared sound clearly there was no future for it then we've got speakers only so this plugs into all of our speakers front left right surround left right and center then we've got optical in up to two sources coaxial in as well as left and right analog in that we've got a power plug and that's about it so thank you for checking out my unboxing that is of interest to nobody but me and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other good technology videos