Introduction
This is a review of Corsair’s SP2500 2.1 Speaker System. The system has been on the market for a few years now. Was released back in 2011. When choosing a speaker system, often a lot of users choose watts over what actually matters. Many systems boast high watts of power as a marketing tactic. The problem with a high watt system is 99% of the time it just means it has a lot of power but will be heavily distorted at anything past half volume. So a high watt system is completely useless. This is where the Corsair SP2500 has an advantage. It’s a 230Watt system that boasts a full volume output without any distortion. You also don’t have to worry about damaging the speaker drivers by running it at full volume which is often the case with other speaker systems.
Features
The speakers come with 2 Satellites that have a 3” mid-range, and a 1” inch tweeter (High range) and 1 8” subwoofer. You may find the subwoofer is quite large compared to other units. This is because the subwoofer unit has 6 crossovers amps built into it.
It also comes with an external volume control that has a digital screen to see the volume level. You can also control the subwoofer volume. So if you decide to do a late night drive. You hopefully won’t wake up your neighbor’s. It comes with a built in EQ control which personally I never use, because I find these to not be pure audio and are fake effects that serve no real purpose. It’s a software modified audio effect. Like “Rock mode” I think many speaker system use this to make up for the lack of quality audio. Something the SP2500 has no problems with. It really does play audio at the quality of the source audio you provide it. In other words you may find some music tracks you have may not be as good as you thought. I suggest investing in high quality flac files for music playing as it is lossless audio codec.
The volume control unit also has a standard headphone jack in case you do need to plug in a set of headphones.
Technical
So why does the SP2500 have 6 crossovers. What is a crossover?
A crossover splits audio into multiple frequency bands, in the case with the SP2500 it has one crossover per speaker. Plus two 60 watt amplifiers. With built in DSP (Digital Signal Processing).
Crossovers like the ones in the SP2500 have built in noise reduction systems in place. Which is what the DSP is. The challenge with crossovers is keeping the sound in phase as it makes it’s way out of the drivers. From a technical point of view you can appreciate the technology behind the SP2500’s.
The drivers themselves use the what in my opinon is the best material for drivers. The 3” and 1” inch drivers uses a silk material, while the other 8” drivers uses rubber. While I personally think paper produces the best sound quality. For durability the rubber 8” is a good choice for a long lasting speaker that can handle the heavy volume the SP2500 allows.
The clarity of the sound from low to mid to high is very clear and crisp. You really do notice this. Where with most speaker systems for computers it all seems very blurry. Most speaker systems don’t really give you a full dynamic range, and they fall way short of delivering a quality sound experience. It’s a bit like taking a high resolution image shrinking it down to 100 pixels and then blowing it up to 2000 pixels. It will be blurry. The SP2500 gives you the full quality. You can even tell from listening to music tracks which tracks have a better recording quality of others. Which is really un-heard of in a sound system of this price range.
Pro’s and Con’s
Pros
It's true some sound systems can be so far off. I had a Sony CD Player back in the day lol. That had a huge amount of distortion being generated from the cd player itself. Wasn't even a speaker system. You could plug it into any speaker system and get the same result. Although if the speaker system was really bad you may not notice it much. Changing to a different player and the distortion was gone. So even other electronics can cause problems.
As for ears yes everyone is different. I do find that when listening to something bad for a long period of time you also get used to it. So it does take time to adjust away from that.
Great review Shawn.
I agree with you regarding music, 2.1 is better than 5.1, when at a concert, the sound is coming from the front, other than theatre acoustics, then the sound will bounce off the room, but same can be said about 2.1 in most rooms.
I play Electronic Drums, I use to use regular headphones (Sony) and noticed that when I recorded my kit it sound nothing like the way I programmed my drums and what they sounded like in the Sony headphones. I later realized these headphone "enhanced" the sound like most (consumer grade) headphones do. I then did a lil research and bought a pair of AKG K240 studio headphone. These do NOT color the sound, so when recording, what I heard in the headphones was what you'd hear through most speakers with bass and treble flat lined.
Also, the other thing to keep in mind, it not everyone's ears are created equal, I'll use myself as an example, due to industrial noise, my hearing is far from being what it once was, so I use equalization to bring up frequencies I now have trouble hearing, so what sounds good to me, probably sounds like hell to someone else! LOL
Take care
Regards: >>>> Jack <<<<
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