Corsair SP2500 2.1 Gaming Audiophile Computer Speakers Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,842 words · ~14 min read
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all right guys if you've followed lonus Tech tips for any sort of extended
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period of time you probably know that I'm a bit of an audio geek so this is
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something that I am extremely excited about this is the brand new SP 2500 from
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Corsair it is from their gaming audio
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series which normally I would sort of
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turn my nose up to and I'd say blah gaming audio that just means it's not
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very good and so they Market it to Gamers who don't know better no
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offense to any of our gamers in the
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audience but Corsair has taken a
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completely different approach to this particular set of gaming audio speakers
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this is a 2.1 setup and they have aimed
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to build the best overall speaker setup
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that they can in a price range that Gamers can still afford so why don't we
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find one side of this box or other that has some specifications on it that I can
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show you and we'll go through what Corsair has to say for themselves about
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this setup so first thing over here we see that Corsair has a 2-year warranty
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on it Corsair's warranty is legendary in this industry so you can pretty much
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believe that they're going to stand behind it for as long as they say all
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right specifications frequency response is from 35 Herz to 20 khz plus orus 3 DB
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okay 220 wat total power that is measured via FTC RMS so that what is
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that means squared or something along those lines which means that it can do
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this for days at a time your speaker
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system not the one that they've submitted for rating okay not for two
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minutes at a time not for one musical note at a time can do it for days at a
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time every single one all right subwoofer Dimensions satellite
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Dimensions you can read those if you want the subwoofer is an 8 in 120 watt
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subwoofer with durable rubber surround okay so it's a bridge dual 60 wat class
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you have Bridge okay so dual amplifi so
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this speaker system actually uses a dual amp design which means that you have one
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amp that drives the larger speaker on your satellite and then you have one amp
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that drives the Tweeter on your satellites so I'll show you guys that
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when I actually take it out of the box you've got an ultra efficient integral
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power supply with uh Universal input so
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imagine that Corsair building something with a good quality power supply in it
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go figure satellites are by Amplified as I mentioned before two-way design with
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Det able audio cables 3-in 40 W mid-range drivers and 1in 40 W ferof
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fluid cooled silk diaphragm tweeters so those are the ones that I was mentioning
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before are independently Amplified 50
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watts per satellite measured via this method the reviewer's guide for this
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actually mentions this a lot it is incredibly important because you can
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build a 1,000 watt speaker setup that
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basically just sounds like noise because it's not cuz all the sound is just being
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corrupted okay so PC input on the subwoofer
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okay you can read all this if you want I suppose uh full oh this is kind of
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actually we'll talk about headphone mode mode in a bit mod x theatrical audio
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processing for Blu-ray and DVD audio that recreates the theater experience that's kind of neat okay so why don't we
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go ahead and start getting this out of the box and I am going to refer to my
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cheat sheet here because the reviewer's guide is that long and it's actually
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chalk full of good information I have read through it a couple times but I
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cannot necessarily be expected to remember remember every little thing
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every time I am human sorry guys okay so
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here in terms of included audio cables we have uh one little headphone jack
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straight pass through okay then we
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have two power cables so those are using
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imagine that a PC company goes and uses four pin CPU power
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connectors okay and then we have an RCA
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cable just like that okay we have a power cord standard PC power cord no it
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isn't look at that it's a two-prong one so there's no ground on this guy I guess
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you probably could use a grounded cable it just wouldn't be uh it wouldn't be
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grounding out via that third prong so
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we're packed using environmentally friendly ow environmentally friendly
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cardboard packaging love to see that so I'm just going to go ahead and start
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taking this stuff out here and that is the subwoofer that
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thing's big oh here we go documentation so let's see what what we have in terms
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of documents that Corsair is going to
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tell us how to use it with so stop do not return this to the store this is a
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quick start guide so the quick guide is like this thick hopefully there are a
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few different languages in there so they show us what's in the box how to use the
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desktop controller how to make all the necessary connections here's some tips
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for the best sound there's tip number one use a high quality sound card bam so
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yes please please do not forget to use a high quality sound card and there we go
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that's the English part so it looks like it's probably in about eight languages
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or so some safety information which you should read but I'm not going to cuz I'm
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actually not plugging it in just yet got some more packaging materials here go
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ahead and pile that behind
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me something in here okay this is what
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unboxing is all about right guys having this experience so here I've got a
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couple of uh speak stands I think is
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what these are but there's only one way to find out for sure and that is to just
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try things until something fits okay so these have little rubber
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feet on them so we'll go ahead and put those aside for now and then we have our
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control pod I'm a big fan of control pods for desktop PC speaker systems
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generally gives you a lot of control this one actually has a bunch of
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different modes that you can use in order to um optimize it for the kind of
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content you're listening to you can can turn on the modx mode which is great for
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some movies Etc you can actually turn on a headphone mode which is optimized for
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actually believe it or not it's optimized for lowquality headphones
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because Corsair uh like myself recognizes that most of the gaming audio
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products out there are just code name for low quality so their headphone mode
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on their speakers is actually designed to compensate for low
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quality gaming headphones so check that out they really thought of everything on
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this one so we'll go ahead and take out one
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of the satellites here I'll show you guys
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this there we are so it's uh pretty
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heavy actually not like super heavy like my KS at home but feels feels built
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anyway it's a very very plain look what we've pretty much come to expect from
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Corsair so here we are there's your power for the Tweeter your power for the
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mid-range and they show you that this is the left speaker so there's your power
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input and then around on the other side
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we find not a whole lot to speak of down on the bottom we see four rubber feet
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and let me just see what these are for
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do they go like this that doesn't make any sense where's
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the picture well we'll figure these out in a
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bit okay so there's one of the tweeters or one of the tweeters one of the
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satellites rather so here we'll grab the other one and then we'll pull out all of
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this packing material so we can get
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access to the supper I'll never be able to pack this back together thankfully I
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don't have to okay so here's the
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sub and we'll go ahead and move the Box thanks
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cameraman and once I've got the whole thing unboxed I'm actually going to take
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a little bit of time and I'm going to go through my cheat sheet with you guys and
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tell you some of the more interesting things things that I learned about this
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speaker setup when I was reading through
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it oh this is different I had kind of expected this to
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uh go from front to back the long way
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okay so here is the front of our
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subwoofer you can see you got a nice little Corsair logo here you got your
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Port here okay the overall finish is the
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like I the the rubberized sort of texture that we saw before cameraman's
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gone ahead and put his iPhone 4 on the subwoofer for scale so that's how large
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the sub is and actually why don't I go ahead and put one of the satellites on
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there as well just so you can see for comparison what it will look like on
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your desk okay so there's the iPhone so let's go ahead and move around to the
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side go ahead and show you guys what it looks like from this side so very very
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very plain what you'd expect from a quality piece of audio equipment it
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shouldn't really stand out it should be all about the the sound it makes not the
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uh appearance of it so here you can see we've got our power input over here on
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the left move along with a bunch of warnings and certifications and all that
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good stuff then we have of course there's part number here and then we've
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got all the business end side of things so we have our remote so that's the uh
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here we go the control pod just plugs in like
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this okay that's pretty straightforward
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next we have our satellites power
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okay so those plug in just like that they are colorcoded and it looks like
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yep they only go in one way so there's your right and then your left goes in
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much the same way all right the other connectivity we
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have down here is our line
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in so you can see we have our left and right and then an auxiliary input so
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that's pretty straight forward and you can see that we have not only the
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auxiliary one here but we also have our auxiliary 2 inut on the back of the
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control pod as well as a USB
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connection so I'll be back in just a
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minute so I'm totally going to cheat a little bit because it's an awful lot to
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remember there's lots of charts and diagrams so we'll go through some of this together but I'm going to show you
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some of the stuff that Corsair has to say for themselves in their reviewer's
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guide so I already mentioned the B Amplified satellite speakers oh we did
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find out what these are for so these are stands you do want to sure for the best
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possible stereo experience that the satellites are mostly pointed at you so
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that means if you're sitting at a desk and your desk is kind of below you you
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would want to position these under the front two feet of the speakers in order
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to have them pointed more at your ears and rather than at your chest so that is
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the reason that they've gone ahead and included that okay studio quality
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digital crossovers so this is a good thing to talk about a little bit I'll
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let cameraman sort of check out the speakers while I drone on over here
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oh actually no first thing this has a 1.8 in TFT color display readable in
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daylight or at night so I'll go ahead and make sure that you oh rather so I'll
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go ahead and make sure that I show you guys what this looks like in one of my
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follow-up videos for this uh this speaker
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set okay uh studio quality digital crossover so you know what I'd really
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recommend going ahead and reading one of the online reviews about this if you
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want to read all of this but basically what it means is that you are going to
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have have a more you're going to have a much finer control over what part of
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your audio signal gets played through the subwoofer what part gets played
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through the mid speakers and what part gets played through the tweeters that's
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pretty much what it means okay technical overview they're basically saying that
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their subwofer uses a fourth order band pass design rather than a simpler ported
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base reflex did I say Bass No I said
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band pass good rather than a simpler ported base reflex subwoofer so these
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two diagrams you know what I'm not not an audio engineer I don't know the
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benefits of that design but it's definitely worth mentioning to you guys
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in case you do know the difference they talk hold on don't necessarily show them
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that I don't know if they can see that so uh they talk an awful lot about why
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using the FTC standard for power output matters and I'm going to summarize a
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couple pages in the reviewer's guide as well it means that it can provide that
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power over an extended period of time it also means that that power is going to
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be balanced between the different parts of the speaker system cuz you could buy a 500 watt speaker system that has a 450
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W subwoofer and 2 25 watt satellites and it's going to provide a very
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unsatisfactory listening experience if you're doing anything other than
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listening to explosions so that's why that is important you have a late night
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mode which I should have mentioned before but what it does is it just adjusts the crossfire crossover point so
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that the satellites are going to play more of your base than the subwoofer
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which means that you're not going to bother your neighbors late at night headphone processing mode I mentioned
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before the mod x processing is for
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making it sound more like a theater and Corsair really recommends they're
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they're not going to go ahead and say that yeah this is the be all and end all
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it's that simple they're just saying you have this option you can try it out if
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you like it great it'll sound great with certain movies bad with others but
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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
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applies processing that attempts to remove or significantly reduce the
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vocals which is pretty neat maybe I'll do like a karaoke video with these
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speakers to show off that uh particular little feature and they've got a bunch
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of other equalizer presets as well pop Jazz FPS so let's talk about what the
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sp2500 is designed for it is designed to be listened to at close range so it's
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not really for your living room it's for a computer okay that's one thing second
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of all it is designed to be used with a sweet spot so if you have multiple
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listeners this is not marketed as you know a 360 degree field of listening or
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anything like that it has a sweet spot which really any speaker system does and
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that is designed to be right where your head is so that's why they include the
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stands that's why they include two speakers you aim them at your head you
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want to create a sweet spot and you got to play around a little bit to find out
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where it is uh one thing they mention in here is why doesn't it have a digital
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input well it's completely unnecessary so I think that covers pretty much
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everything I want to say about the sp2500 don't forget to subscribe to
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