It’s just impossible to imagine a modern PC without sound. Movies, games, music – all these are integral parts of any home entertainment centre. Nevertheless, there are people who still do without the speakers or settle with those “squeakers” which they used to purchase long time ago as a cross-selling addition to their PC. Today we will deal with speakers which may serve as an excellent New Year present. On our test bench today is SVEN MS-908, 2.1, a system of unusual design.
Dish it out!
SVEN MS-908 package comprises a pair of speakers and an amplifying subwoofer. The whole of the subwoofer is made from wood and painted black. The front panel they made from black glossy plastic, placed the firm’s logo and installed a 12-cm drive. Bass reflex migrated to the back panel together with inputs and volume and bass controls. The system is plugged to sound source via RCA-cable.
Cables run from the subwoofer to a pair of satellites made from black glossy plastic. The speakers are slim and of interesting shape. When seen side-face they remind of worms from “The Worms”. When the satellites are turned on a blue LED underneath lights up creating especially striking impression in darkness.
The speakers turned to be quite a surprise here: they were expected to make up a common pair of midrange speaker and HF speaker. But they proved to be different here as only one large speaker has electrical connection while the other functions only as a passive radiator driven by vibrations inside the cabinet. Fortunately, SVEN accurately considered the speakers slant angle so when placed on table they direct the sound straight into ears which is very important with such small-sized satellites.
The Fight is Going on…
The speakers test we conducted in several steps. At the first step we sourced sound from iPod nano player, then we plugged the system to PC. We abandoned the idea of using on-board sound source in favor of high quality Burr-Brown DAC.
The sound performance of the speakers is very hard to describe. If you change over from Hi-Fi quality audio system to these speakers you will perceive the drawbacks at once, especially in midrange frequencies. Nevertheless, if this is your first speaker system after 200-rubles-worth “squeakers” the effect will be astounding. The speaker system pays off every ruble creating amazingly dense and powerful sound.
The leading edge of the system is the subwoofer. By fiddling with controls you can achieve quality sound performance, so the main thing here is not to do amiss with the speakers’ positioning. Initially, we placed the subwoofer on table only to obtain practically a third channel which disturbed the stereo sound pattern. But as soon as we lowered the subwoofer to the floor level the system revealed itself and its sound got a pleasant depth.
The system is best fit for watching movies and reproducing concert-hall records. We started a live-performance of Motley Crue — Lewd, Crued & Tattoed on SVEN MS-908 and… zoned out for all the one and a half hours, the whole of disk playback time. The subwoofer had performed above all praise, distinctly emphasizing drums and bass guitar.
As for games sounding, MS-908 champions here too: shootings and bomb explosions boomed excellently in the subwoofer and even reverberated somewhere at the thorax level.
But for satellite speakers, a price of 3000 rubles could well have been bidden for a SVEN MS-908 package. But the actual price of the system is 1300 rubles, and a well justified one too. It’s quite possible that for reproducing classical and vocal compositions the ditto SVEN may well offer some better solutions than this system, but the latter performs pretty well in games, plays the concert-hall and music compositions with deep bass, and has a pleasing appearance into the bargain.