Review: Sound Science QSB USB Speakers
Sound
Seeing as these speakers are designed to be moved around, we took the time to try them in a variety of places and for a variety of uses.
To start with, we hooked them up to an iMac and fired up iTunes. The Mac recognized them as an audio device straight away and we were able to select them as our output device without any problems. The speakers themselves have no audio controls, so you’re reliant on your OS settings and the settings for the media application or game that you’re using. At low volumes we weren’t too impressed, the sound was better than the built in speakers of the iMac, but not what we would call stellar performance.
Then we turned them up.
The sound that these speakers can produce at high volume is nothing short of incredible. We sat in disbelief as Brian May jammed out a guitar solo at full tilt, the depth and clarity were simply astounding. Unfortunately not everyone was as thrilled so we rocked the volume back slightly, but even then we were impressed. Certainly any volume level above 50% gave us the kind of results we’d be happy with, though for volumes lower than that we’d probably stick with the built in speakers as the difference wasn’t that great.
Next, we connected these to the trusty Alienware laptop for a bit of HD gaming. Now, normally when I play on this machine I have my headset on, so this was a bit of a break from tradition. We found the sound to be a definite improvement over the built in speakers at pretty much every volume level. In many instances we noticed sound effects that simply hadn’t registered before, even at low volume levels. Crank them up to eleven and the QSB’s helped to create a much more realistic environment, with gunfire ringing crisply and explosions providing a thumping bass sound that left us very impressed.
Finally, we hooked the speakers up to a media PC running XBMC Live (based on Ubuntu). We were expecting problems with this one as it isn’t a full release of Ubuntu. It;s just a cut down Linux kernel with just enough features to run XBMC. Fortunately we experienced no such problems though, the speakers were picked up as the main audio device automatically and we were listening to our media through them in seconds. We found audio from TV shows and movies to be a lot clearer with these speakers than with the speakers built into the flat panel TV, though less impressive than we’d found with music or with gaming. Voices are clearer, especially at high volumes, and the sound is generally better defined. Again we found that subtle background noises that we’d otherwise missed were quite apparent, while not getting in the way of the main content.
Conclusions.
We’ve given the QSB speakers a bit more of a test than you might expect for a simple set of speakers. We felt it important to test them in a variety of different circumstances and in different types of location. Not once did we find them to be of less use than the speakers or headset that they were replacing, and moving them from place to place was an absolute breeze. It’s a bit of a shame that they won’t work with other devices such as Android tablets, but then this is down to a lack of support within Android, not any fault of the speakers themselves.
They are definitely more impressive at higher volumes than you might expect. Speakers of this physical size often struggle when pushed too far but if anything these speakers improve the higher you set the volume. They’re not going to fill Wembley stadium, but for medium to large sized rooms you shouldn’t experience any problems whatsoever.
In terms of price, the QSB’s are on sale at AdvancedMP3Players for just under £90, which is a lot for a set of portable speakers. But these simply blow every other set of portable speakers that we’ve used out of the water, both in terms of performance and style. If you’re in the market for a set of portable speakers then you could certainly do a lot worse in this area of the market, these chomp at the heels of speakers that cost two or three times as much while offering comparable levels of performance.