need new speakers

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My dear daughter cranked up the p.c. yesterday and blew out the speakers we had. We need to buy new ones but don’t want them too cheap but at the same time, don’t want some salesperson trying to convince us to get more than we need. I have never bought them before, I don’t have a clue what to get. We’re not looking entertainment system here, just something that’s going to last through a Cold Play cd without going tinny and scratchy.

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I suspect the first question you need to ask is how many speakers you want, which will be governed by how many are supported by your sound card. Two will be adequate, if you don’t need lots of bass. But presumably you will need a large speaker, usually called a Woofer, as well as the two Tweeters, if you are going to play something noisy (I suppose ColdPlay is a modern beat combo?). And if you really want to pay lots of money, and have cables trailing all over the room, you can just keep adding speakers.

The second question is how much power (in watts) can your sound card turn out at maximum volume? The speakers you choose need to be able to cope with this amount of power (and also so do your windows!). As a rule of thumb, the bigger the speakers, the more inefficient they are, and the larger the amount of power they will absorb.

The third question relates to where you are going to put them. Will they fit on your computer desk, or wherever you are going to locate them?

The fourth question relates to “Just how much do you want to pay?”. In the UK, one website lists them from about

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Thanks, John, for the explanation. One more question, please. What is a sub-woofer? I saw a lot of 2 + sub-woofer speaker combos but don’t want to blast myself (andor my sanity) out of the house when little wee one turns up the volume on one of her cds or games.

We just got a new p.c. and used the speakers from our old p.c., so I’m thinking that maybe it was just time for them to go, and she was the unfortunate “victim.”

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If I may butt in, any decent speaker system has separate units for high and low tones (even if they are installed in one speaker box). The treble speakers can be very small, but a bass speaker must have a certain physical volume in order to be able to produce the low tones. If you get just two speaker boxes (left and right), they are either small and can hardly render bass tones, or they get quite large – taking up a lot of space on your desk.
Human ears can hear the direction of high tones, but we can hardly determine where a low tone comes from. So it is possible to use just one speaker for low tones, plus two smaller ones for the high tones (providing the stereo effect). The bass speaker – this is the sub-woofer – will be relatively large, but it doesn’t matter very much where you put it; you can place it under the desk for example, or somewhere else where it isn’t in the way.
A sub-woofer will not necessarily blast you out of the house.

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I suppose it is a moot point whether a bass speaker is a woofer or a sub-woofer; the latter, I would think, will vibrate at the sort of low notes that cause your internal organs to resonate!

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Thanks everyone! Now that I have a better idea of what to get, we can hopefully come to a decision this weekend. Since daughter is paying out of her allowance, I guess I need to figure out how many chores she’ll be owing me for a few months….

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You will definitely enjoy a 3 speaker system. Any of the systems Cowboy listed sound really great.

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Well, we ran out to the store Saturday (couldn’t wait for snail mail) and got the Creative Labs 2.1 that Cowboy had listed. Boy – what a difference! Blasted the cat out of the rec room when we fired up the p.c. and now we are having fun with those XP sound effects.

Thanks again, everybody!

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Do you not have less cruel methods of feline removal? (Though I applaud the result!!)

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Clearly off topic – and at the risk of being trashed by cat enthusiasts, but our dearest was being his usual dog-chewing, trash-tipping, woodwork-clawing, kid scratching nasty self and, well… we didn’t do it on purpose. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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