The Audio Listening Tests

The Audio Listening Tests

Though listening and experiencing sound is a subjective thing, we'll give it a go.

First off, we choose quality and as such for the music we listen to FLAC files, uncompressed lossless data ensuring we on the binary side of things have our stuff perfect. Soundcard wise we make use of an Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 DeLuxe, a great quality soundcard with the very best components. The settings for this card are left at default, we will  not alter or tweak audio quality on the soundcard DSP side of things.

And why FLAC  you wonder? FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.

Music

Ilse de Lange - World of HurtIlse is a Dutch pop/country singer with probably one of the best voices in the Netherlands. World of Hurt  is the song we are listening to, and immediately when we start up the song we feel that the voice and higher tones seem near perfect, the acoustic bass was not as dynamic sounding as usual though, the sub seems to fight back that  pure warm sounding bass. Overall - the voice sounds great, the bass is okay, good enough but again, we seem to miss a little extra. Country / pop sounds good. Could be a little better though. But overall very decent quality.

Limp Bizkit - Behind Blue Eyes
We listen to a live acoustic version of the songs. Everybody knows the song and tje warm and full sound once the tune starts at "None knows what it's like ...", and that's the case with the SP2500 as well. Hearing the song the first time over the SP2500 kit can give you goose bumps really.  The speakers produce excellent quality for this live version. Bass, mids and treble all sounded really good and the SP2500 brought out the musical aspects of this material really well.

Sara K - I Can't Stand The Rain
We've had country, classic rock .. now we gotza have a little warm R&B slash blues like tunes ! What a great song this is, and what an excellent acoustic version you can purchase of this song. The SP2500 sounds close to perfection when the song starts, the bass guitar, it's nice, raw and dynamic enough, yet misses out just a tint of bass in the higher frequency, which slightly worries me as it is the second time we notice it. But overall nice and high tones, great full sounding voice. Yeah a pleasure to listen to.

Johnette Napolitano and Danny - The Scientist
This seriously is a much better cover than the original from Cold Play. We feel the guitar is a sounding good. Voices sound great, the synth is nice and warm sounding. Once the bass and drums kick in it sounds good, very good in fact. There's nothing to add here other then we really enjoyed the song on the SP2500.

Prokofiev's Montagues and Capulets - (Introduction) as played by the London Symphony Orchestra from Romeo and Juliet. Yes, the song is as long as its full title. Sound was deep and clear. Perfect, seriously perfect clarity on strings and cello, its my favorite dramatic piece of classic music. The SP2500 is is dealing with the orchestra really well here.

Foo Fighters - I wanted a really nasty hard song in today's audio palette as well. The two Foo Fighters tracks I listened to where diverse. An acoustic version of Foo Fighters Learning to Fly and something to scream, your lungs out with, Darling Nicky was simply stated juicy. I'm a bit of an audiophile but once the lead singer starts screaming 'Come back Nickeeeeh' from the top of his lung you know for real that the SP2500 pretty much can take a seriously nasty beating. No probs whatsoever.

The acoustic version of Learning to fly was sounding great, where synthetic bass sounds great again I miss a little more dynamic / acoustic bass in this song. It's hard to rate but 8 out of 10 points would apply best to describe the bass quality. Whereas the mid and high-tones are clear and sharp, rated 9 out of 10. And I know I am nitpicking and also understand that any sub-woofer fights with this.

Movies
The richness of detail in sound combined with the volume makes me state that this kit can actually fill up a normal sized living room. Noises are sharp, explosions deep in the Transformers 3 trailer we initially started up, impressive. We quickly moved towards The Matrix 3 - Revolutions, the movie just sounds really convincing. We do miss out on more channels of audio. Watching movies these days really requires at the very least left, right, center and subwoofer speakers. it's that center that I miss the most.

but overall sound quality for watching movies in stereo with the SP2500 is extremely good.

The last movie we tried was Iron Man (1) which we'll try to describe a little more in detail. Aah, what a nice movie (oh come on you love it as well). Close to the intro sequence we get an explosion where the Hummer is attacked and just before it the metallic tune from ACDC - Back in Black kicks in. The experience is grand, ACDC sounds just right from that split second the snare drum, bass and guitar simultaneous kicks in. When Brian Johnson opens his mouth you wonder, will the speakers survive it... and indeed they do, really well in great clarity.

Movie sounds and effects are crisp and clear. The cinematic soundtrack and strings are again clear and sounding full and rich. The entire movie is simply a joy to watch, but in this case listen to as well. Rich and sharp sound, no distortion.

These speakers deliver what they should in very high quality sound. I never had the feeling that the speakers where lacking power, though we did drive it close to its maximum. That amplifier in there produces enough juice to fill a bedroom sized room. As the battle rages, and Iron man flies through the sky all sounds convincingly right. But yeah, we did miss that center speaker for dialog. Other then that the balance between brightness and smoothness of the treble and voices sound clear, dialog is sharp and the movie soundtrack full and rich.
 

Gaming
We played several games using these speakers and for what it's worth, it sounds just great. Perhaps all I can say is that if you are a hardcore gamer and play games where environmental sounds are pretty important you might want to look for a 5.1 or higher speaker set because no-matter what you do with a 2.1 set you will not hear the enemy sneak up on you from behind.

Flipping that coin around works also, gaming can provide just as much enjoyment to many. The speaker system sounded quite good when imaging large environments in the COD series for example.

We tested games like COD, Anno 1404 and Metro 2033. These games are tested using the Xonar HDAV 1.3 Deluxe to see how the responded using different in game effect routines. The tests were encouraging for the most part with the subwoofer just can take it all and though setup a bit too high a very loud explosion is just not an issue for the sub.

Imaging and pinpointing of enemies was fairly good with this system although some blurring was noticed during high actions sequences where there are many tracks, effects and action being played at once.

And call of Duty MW2 - Cranking up the volume and hearing a tank rolling up on you and the gears moving the turret, makes you want to run, oh dear... incoming! The overall game sound experience is full and clear. And one explosions kick in, you can rest assured that the sub can take it really well -- opposed to your neighbors.