Corsair SP2500

The SP2500 represents Corsair's second venture into the world of sound and here they've rolled out the big guns!

Hardware: dated design

The satellite speakers are unfortunately designed (rectangular, plastic and heavy looking) and, like the subwoofer, have a sandblasted, very 90s coating. Apart from this, the finish is excellent and the materials used of good quality. Even the matte, coloured plastic is a lot less cheap looking than usual.

The wired remote is very practical for controlling either the general volume or that of the subwoofer. Note however that this is a pretty big kit. The subwoofer, for example, is 49 cm wide!

You can use a double-RCA as the main in on the subwoofer and there's a mini-jack auxliary in with another on the remote. There's also a headphones socket on the remote and a USB. Unfortunately, the USB is only there for updating the kit's firmware. There's no built-in DAC. Another nasty surprise is that the wires linking to the satellite speakers are very short. They're also cabled to the subwoofer rather than the remote, which will make installation difficult in some cases.

Audio: a clean powerful subwoofer

90% of multimedia 2.1 kits have the same fault: the satellite speakers struggle to reproduce the lowest part of the mid-range. To compensate for this lack, most manufacturers regulate the subwoofer bass frequency cut-off too high. As the subwoofer often doesn't necessarily handle the lowest sounds all that well in any case, you can end up with an incomprehensible, muddy result.

Corsair, however, has taken the trouble to build some real satellite speakers with boomers for the mid-range and separate tweeters (bi-amplification). There's still a slight gap in the low mid-range - the boomer only measures 7.6 cm and cuts out at 5 kHz and is therefore more at ease in the upper end of the mid spectrum than the lower - but at least the subwoofer can be left to concentrate on the bass.

The subwoofer is unusually designed for a multimedia kit. Rather than having the bass reflex with an air vent at the back of the speaker, the subwoofer has a driver located in a sealed chamber at the back to reduce distortion, with the bass reflex at the front. This means you don't see the speaker at the front but rather the air vent. When well set-up, such a system can produce really nice sound and gives great sub control, but when even slight design errors creep in, the sound can be ruined.

Thankfully Corsair has done its work well and the subwoofer is a great success. The satellite speakers are also very much at ease overall though, as we mentioned above, there is a slight abuse of the high mid-range and the loss of low mid-range. Note also, the tweeters are very directive which can result in a loss in intelligibility. These faults could be corrected without too much effort.

For a first attempt, Corsair has done very well. In spite of a few faults in terms of the sound reproduction, the slightly clumsy design and a few other features that could have been better thought out (length of the satellite speaker cabling, USB etc.), the SP2500 does better than many existing products from more established manufacturers. We're looking forward to the forthcoming models.