kandan

I can't believe you guys havent tried a shoebox speaker before ! I kinda thought it's the first speaker anyone would have before you could afford to buy a good one. I guess people are rich enough in America to buy speakers off a month's earnings Anyways, I've had a quad setup with two 5 inch midrange speakers and two 8 inch wooffers. They were all housed in cardboard boxes left behind after a house decoration. (I remember some of them were boxes which held electrical wiring cables). I simply cut out a circular area on one face and poked holes where one would have normally screwed on the speakers to the wood. I fixed the speakers by running strong cotton thread through the screw holes and the holes poked in the cardboard. I only had a walkman at that time, and I made a cheap stereo amplifier with a 741 opamp. I enclosed the walkman and the amplifier circuit board in a shoebox. I poked a small hole in the shoebox to screw through the volume, bass and treble pots. This was my setup in college for 2.5 years before I came to the US for grad school You ask about the performance ? Man people flocked to my dorm to listen to the marvelous 'immersive sound' Gee I could have made some money by ticketing them..hmm. Seriously, as long as I kept the volume low, I was immensely satisfied with the sound. At higher volumes, the speakers would vibrate against the carboard box and the cardboard box would vibrate against the wall. There were lots of tricks I learned about loudspeaker construction by playing with my system. It always tends to be boomy, though one of my friends who also was a shoeboxer, discoverd a way to cut off the bass by porting ! Also the sound is very warm and cozy. The rockers won't enjoy it, but for indian classical music, I was in heaven. Klipschs'es are way better than any shoebox speakers you can come up with (My present setup is still cheap, ksb1.1's with kc .5 and a ksw 12 through a yamaha receiver). But I've enjoyed my experiences with my shoebox speakers. They were very satisfying. When I go broke, I shall sell all my klipsch'es and buy a bunch of radioshack speakers and scavenge for shoeboxes. Swamy

Hello everybody, Am upgrading from my Promedia 4.1's to the Quintets. I live in a very tiny studio (living space approx. 12X10, second floor ). I might be moving to a slightly larger room in 4 months, but it is unlikely to be bigger than 15 X 15. My question is this : what subwoofer do I go for ? The KSW10 sells for $300 at the Tweeters in my area, and the KSW12 for $450. I would definitely like to save the 150 bucks cus I also have to buy a receiver. But I've read some bad reviews of the KSW10's in this forum. Is it adviceable to spend the extra bucks and go for the 12's ? What is wrong with the 10's ? Yes, I did listen to them both at Tweeters and KSW12 was better by far, but I still want to factor in the size of my room and the cost. (By the way I am only a student and dont have much money to spend.) Are there any serious issues with the 10's that make them bad ? I would very very much appreciate your help, cus I want to buy the sub's now when they are cheap . Thankyou

I've had my refurbs for 2 months now. Was working fine until oneday last week the sub began to get weak. The bass was almost absent and at higher volumes the whole sub began to rattle. I got pissed and asked for a refund. I opened up the sub yesterday to look around, and found a wire to have come loose. I just plugged the wire back in and my sub is back in top form. There is no way the jumper could have come loose unless it was connceted poorly at the workshop. I'm thinking klipsch ppl aren't too serious with their refurb sets leading to such shoddy workmanship.

I think the stereo output is being played back in 4 speakers.

Hi Lorraine, At any time only one of the sound cards will work. You could choose between which card you want to use from control panel/audio settings, but only one will be activated. I do not think there is any way you could use both sound cards simultaneously. You could try fixing your 4 channel sound card, or probably buy a new 5.1 card.

IMPORTANT : Please read through the details ENTIRELY before trying the following on your system. Hello, I am currently using a 20 times cheaper alternative to a reciever and a center channel. I use a 'ghost' center channel. Here's how I do it : If you are using any of the newer sound cards, they should have separate inputs for MIC and a CD/LINE-IN . And your sound card ( if 5.1) should have 3 outputs for your speakers, only 2 of which you would be using for the PM 4.1's. My idea is to feed the third output ( marked CENTER/SUBWOOFER) back in through the MIC and LINE-IN ports !! To get the best center channel presence, I split the center/subwoofer channel in to two streo channels. (BAsically u have a Y with streo jacks on all 3 ends. You can buy the required cables at Radioshack ), and then simply pass whatever signal comes out of the center channel to the MIC and LINE_IN. Make sure the mic volume is turned to less than 50 % before u do this (u can do it on the sound mixer). Now all you have to do is to ask your sound card to play in a 5.1 mode instead of 4.1 mode When the center channel is fed back through tthe LINE-IN, it is played equally loud on both the front speakers, giving an appearence of a 'ghost' center speaker In my sound card (SB Extigy... yup I have a laptop) doing this seems to cut out the subwoofer . That is why I take another portion of the center channel and feed it back through the MIC (mic volume turned down ) and the subwoofer works like a charm. I am glad to say my interests in any 5.1 system is now totally vanished It is absolutely amazing how the sound quality improves while watching DVD's on my setup. You won't believe there is no center channel ! The dialogs come right out of my monitor ! As for the reciever, just get the latest PowerDVD software. It has DTS decoding too. That is all I use. As I said, I have completely lost interest in the Klipsch 5.1's now. My 4.1's (refurbished at that too are as good as any 5.1 systems out there. Cheers

Hiya Snuf, There could be problems with the speaker wire that connects to your rear speaker. Chek it for damages, and make sure you have not looped it around itself too mush (avoid looping ur extra spaker wire, it acts as an inductor and induces a voltage in your speaker wires. It is a trap for any electromagnetic signal, including power lines). I would switch the wire running to the speaker in question and see if the problem persists.

There could be reasons other than a damaged cable. The problem you are having now is definitely a ground loop problem. Tpically the wires carrying signals to your speakers or whatever have one terminal fixed at zero voltage (grounded), and your signal is the voltage between the ground and the live terminal. Problem is sometimes the ground voltage is no longer at zero (actually there is no absolute zero, but lets say zero for te time being) because theere are many appliances which interconnect to the same ground. There could be a potential difference between any 2(or more) such grounds, and this leads the famous ground loops. Basically instead of one terminal being zero, it is different from zero, so the sound u get on your speakers is different from what it should be. This is what cuses the distortion. Most of the time the ground loop is from interference wit your mail power line to your home, so you get a 60 HZ hum. But the loop cpould be with other appliances in your room/house. So actually disconnecting some other appliance could kill the hum Also avoid looping your extra cable wire. Especially near power lines. I don't think I have conveyed anything logical here, but you may want to remember the key word "ground loop" if you are looking for ore info. Good luck with the trouble shooting peace

Mine had speaker wires that looked like they were used in a house while the walls were being painted It had patches of white paint all over and was a tangled mess. But the speakers looked great! There were minor paint scratches on one sattelite. That ia all. The sound quality has been great. No complaints.

You should chech for cable damages. Ususally grounding of the speaker wires produces an irritating high pitched hum (even when nothing is playing). If there is any cut or bruise in your speaker wires causing a damage to the insulation, that would be the cause. If u find any damage, try disconnecting power to that cable to see if u still hear a hum.

It is very true that the sound with a USB sound card is not going to be as good as with a PCI card. Even if u have a fast proessor and lots of RAM for games, the performance is hit by the limited bandwidth of the USB 1.1 interface. Even the up market USB sound cards for music composition/recording suffer from the same problem. Excemplary gaming experience is going to be a little hard with an external sound card, but it is not so huge that u'd notice it, unless u are a hardcore gamer. Its definitely a plus to have higher processor speed while gaming with extigy, cus it draws a lot of CPU time too. Bottom line is, if you have a laptop, you cannot expect the same performance for stuff designed for monster desktops. Extigy is the closest you can get to desktop sound, and it really is damn close. By the way there are a few PCMCIA based sound cards too. (it fits in to the PC card slots found in almost all laptops) I believe they offer higher band width than USB, but I am not sure. Flip side is thay are very expensive. I believe Extigy is the way to go as far as laptop sound is concered. For the moment anyway. The newer models of notebooks (and desktops) come with USB 2.0 ports. USB 2 has around 480 MBps data transfer speed which is around 40 tmes the bandwidth of USB 1.1 With the bandwidth constraint gone, you could expect better and faster external sound cards soon. But if you dont have USB 2 ports, Extigy is the best there is for under $150 I have no idea about Maya 5.1 (naively i'd rate extigy over maya, cus extigy's een around longer, and it has some really cool features like EAX wich is very nice for listening classical music and watching DVD's if not for games, for which it is primarily provided), but I would'nt go for sonica. Sonica has ONLY digital output. U CANNOT connect klipsch 4.1 to it. U can use sonica if you have a surround sound reciever which has a digital in capability, like klipsch's Digital Dream. Sonica is a USB product you can use to hook ur laptop to a regular home theater RECIEVER, not to analog speakers like the PM 4.1's. By the way, I don't understand why there is no Firewire sound card so far. Firewire is much faster than USB. My laptop is more than a year old and it already has a firewire port. It seems very strange ppl aren't concentrating on getting out a firewire based external sound card. Peace.

Hello , Sonica only has a digital output. I don't think you can connect the 4.1's to them. Maya 5.1 looks ok. But there doesn't seem too many reviews about it. I have a compaq presario laptop which I connect to my PM 4.1's with Sound Blaster Extigy. I must say I am very pleased with the Extigy. Well, as long as you keep it connected before you boot, there is absolutely no problem. Sometimes it doesn't work when you connect it when the laptop is on. But it has happened very infrequently, and I resolve it by turning the Extigy on and off untill the comp recognizes it And ya, sometimes the remote controller doesn't work. Again I play around and it starts working again. The cool thing about the exteral sound card is you can connect your MP3 player or cassette player or DVD player or TV or VCR or any damned thing to it, and get excellent quality sound. It almost like a stand alone reciever. Extigy also has some CMSS technology wich converts stereo input (say from ur mp3 player) to a pseudo 5.1 output. So u can get surround sound from almost anything. I have been using extigy for a month now, and I am very happy. There are lots of reviews abt it. (lots of negetive reviews too) It definitely is not the best product (you can get external sound cards used by recording artists if u can dish out in excess of $600) but it is darned good enough for me. Again you may have to chek out Maya to see if it is better than EXtigy. I bought my extigy for ~ $78 ($128- $50 rebate) I think the rebate period is over, but you may just get lucky over the holiday sales. By the way along with my 4.1's I use the woofer and left channel of an old 2.1 as a center channel. So I actually have a cool 5.1 system Extigy is very cool for music (it has the EAX positioning technology which is real useful for games, and can be used to simulate theater or cocert settings for music / DVD too). Extigy with klipsch 4.1 really rocks (really really rocks) with DVD movies. I'd give it 2 thumbs up. good luck in your shopping