astrallite

It's a great headphone, really follows the Harman curve closely and has some of the lowest distortion numbers and maybe the fastest driver in a headphone yet. Unfortunately it's kind of heavy, and lacks soundstage for a top of the line headphone, due it's use of a traditional dome driver. Domes produces spherical sound waves which compress as they approach the ear cavity, which reduces the size of the image. This was actually the reason that Sennheiser went with a ring radiator with the HD800, as the flat sound wave it produces gives a massive sound stage, similar to the flat waves produced by large electrostatic or planar drivers. It's very close to being the perfect headphone, but I feel the Hifiman HE1000V2 checks more boxes and I've been enjoying it a bit more than the Utopias. The much lighter headphone also is great. Also planars do have a leg up over dynamics (even with Focal's fantastic beryllium driver) in terms of bass texture.

If you manage to get $300 that would be a true testament of it's resell value. These speakers were selling for $339 direct from Klipsch in 2002!

The Quintet 3 is the same design as the Promedia Ultra sats, just a 3.5" midrange instead of 3". No problem to drive.

The 6ohm rating is some kind of FCC requirement. All the 6 ohm rating does is cut down on output of the speakers. It's actually recommended to NEVER use a lower ohm mode as you can easily drive a speaker into clipping with this artificial hard cap placed on the power output.

http://www.soundstageav.com/speakermeasurements.html Take a look at the impedence curves. Tweeters take almost no energy to drive. 100hz-1KHz (the range that the woofers produce the most output at) look like 5-6 ohms nominal in most speakers measured here. There are very few speakers that are true 8 ohms in the critical midrange area. There is no such thing as 8 ohms receivers or 6 ohms receivers. The receiver is the amplifier, not the resistor. The speaker is. Amplifiers produce amperes. If it can't supply enough amps for a heavier load, it will overload. If it overloads easily, it's a cheap receiver. There are two ways that you can blow speakers. The first is to overload the amplifier, which sends a square sine wave that will blow out the tweeters (woofers have greater heat dissapation so they will typically survive this). The second is to surpass the excrusion limits (xmax) of a woofer (tweeters generally are less likely to blow from this since high frequencies do not require large excursion). A satellite speaker will is not going to present a heavy enough load to clip/overload an amplifier because you will reach the xmax limits of the woofer/midrange driver LONG before you drive the amp to clipping. Ohm rating is not worth even thinking about. Here is the typical impedence curve of a 3" midrange driver. It's not going to present a problem for an amplifier to drive.

Have you ever looked at an impedence curve before?

It's not really that important, and most satellites run closer to 10-16 ohms. Little satellite speakers are not going to drive an amplifier into clipping.

Push the midrange cone in gently. Do it for the other speaker. Does one seize up? Then the driver is blown. Nothing you can do but to replace it.

During normal use, the Qts and fs of the speakers have shown to measurably return to equilibrium once the speakers are put to rest (Audioholics has an article on this). This is with "well-designed", drivers with modern materials in the last ~7-8 years used in commercial speakers. Some older designs will certainly change over time but this is due to driver detioration (foam surrounds rotting). I can't speak for PC speakers though.

No, this is not normal at all. Something is wrong with your set.

It only takes ten seconds to make a "permanent" equilibrium change to a drivers performance parameters, which some manufacturers do before shipping their speakers. After that, equilibrium performance will not change unless the speaker happened to sustain damage. But a speakers FR is dynamic, and speakers performance parameters do change as they are played over time, however the change is temporary, and the driver's performance will return to an equilibrium state once the speaker returns to rest. People who play their speakers for 80 hours over the weekend to "break them in" before doing "critical listening" will indeed find the speakers sound different, but it's a temporary state that will quickly dissapear, and the next morning it will sound "un broken in."

Wow, the PC speaker market must be really bad if you can resell multimedia speakers that high. Or maybe as they say, there's one born every minute?

I don't see how it would.

If the speakers are working but the sub isn't, then either the subwoofer driver is blown or the amp is nonfunctional.

At least it's Class B. If it was Class A it would draw maximum power whether it was playing or not, like a rotary engine.

You certainly can, although wired in parallel means the impedence will drop in half, meaning the load will double. Just watch the volume.

You could have returned the messed up 2.1s you know. And I'm surprised you didn't notice the mids weren't playing right away. A speaker sounds really weird witha hole between 120hz and 2,200hz.The entire fundamental frequencies of the human voice lie in that range (100 - 900hz) and a good chunk of the harmonics (900 - 8,000hz).

I hope you didn't pay much for those promedias, without working satellites I'm not sure if that sub is worth more than $25-30 by itself.

Open up the satellites and see if the woofers cabling (usually a red wire) is connected to the crossover circuit.

The Bose multimedia speakers are terrible. Untreated paper 2" drivers, cheap thin plastic (resonating) enclosures. You should just totally scratch it off the list. The Promedia 2.0 Ultras have a tweeter and a pair of 2.5" mids. The Groove 2.0 is just a single 3", so all things equal, it won't be to play as accurately as the Ultras. The T-40 is probably out of your price range (retails for $250!--total ripoff), and as far as I know it just doubles up the midrange drivers. I also forgot to mention the Logitech Z-520s which is a pretty neat dipole speaker, it has front and rear firing tweeters and a 3" midrange; designed to improve dispersion over standard satellite speakers. They are at the high end of your price range though ($100 on provantage).

Either there's something wrong with the 2.1s you bought, or they just aren't the speakers for you. Because those HK195s...well never mind.

Have previous speakers you've owned perform better in the midrange? If so, which speaker were they?

Paradigm Signature S8 ($5400) or Usher BE-10 ($10,000). Both with fantastic beryllium based tweeters. All the detail of metal without the ugly resonance (breaks up at 50KHz, well past human hearing).

There's no need for 7.1, first of all, there are only 17 movies with 7.1 sound (all on blu ray), all of them obscure, most of them really old, and lastly, they don't have 7.1 sound, it's 6.1 with a mirrored surround. Discrete 7.1 does not exist. Dolby Digital HD and DTS-Master are 5.1 and 6.1. How about 1) 4 x Energy C-300 fronts ($520) http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=ENC300%20%20%20%20SBLK 2) 8" subwoofer http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=ADPROEVI%20%208BLK You can just run a phantom center...it's almost impossible to find a space to put a center channel anyway.

Try Ascend Acoustics CBM-170SE http://ascendacoustics.com/pages/products/speakers/cbm170/cbm170.html Or Tweakcity Audio WAF-1 http://tweakcityaudio.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=21&category_id=7&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1 Energy RC-10. http://www.vanns.com/shop/servlet/item/features/542469405/energy-rc10?v_c=GoogleBase&ne_ppc_id=914&ne_key_id=6349809 They are the most linear and accurate speakers you can find under $40. Energy is a Klipsch brand if you feel strongly about supporting Klipsch. If you want floorstanders you might have to go slightly above $400 (after shipping): Polk Monitor 70 http://www.jr.com/polk-audio/pe/POK_MONITOR70BK/#productTabShipping