Sweex Arena

Sweex does a bit of everything when it comes to hardware and includes some budget audio equipment in its catalogue. The Arena, a 2.1 kit for £55, is one of them. Will its performance manage to convince us?

Hardware: did they pick the plastic up cheap?

When you get the Arena out of the box, the first thing you'll see is that the quality of the plastics leaves a lot to be desired. What's more it's glossy. This doesn't give a very good first impression of the product and doesn't necessarily make you want to leave it on top of your desk for all to see.

The trimmings are rather spare too. We do like the wired remote, something we've already seen from Edifier, which you can plug your headphones or an additional source into.

The kit is also nice and compact.

Audio: power is nothing without control

The Arena could have been a very nice entry level kit... if only it didn't try and push things so hard.

Even though it isn't announced as being all that powerful, the kit does give plenty out. The thing is this power isn't controlled and results in a very sketchy sound that saturates rapidly for no obvious reason, even when the music it's trying to pump out isn't all that demanding in terms of sound reproduction.

No surprises when it comes to the bass. All you get are low mediums with the bass sounds themselves not particularly deep. The satellites can't handle the mid-range properly and settle for giving you high notes, which are relatively clean as long as you don't increase the volume too much.

Once again, we can't really say we're impressed with this budget audio kit. It's hard to find decent performance and a nice design at this price. Just a little more effort would have given a better result.