Cooler Xtreme : Audio
/ Sound : Boston Accoustics BA4800
Boston Accoustics BA4800
Features
The package comes with plastic,
3 foot tall rear stands for the rear speakers. I have heard people complain
about these stands, but during my testing I found them to be pretty cool.
The stands are really short, but their mounts are angled so that the rear
speakers would point at an upward angle and throw their sound field in the
appropriate location. The small tripod like feet keep the stands upright,
but they are wobbly and would topple over if you bump into them. I just
tried to be careful, and no unfortunate accidents occurred while I had these
installed. The front speakers are mounted on plastic mini pedestals, which
was odd to me, since all of the higher end BA multimedia speakers always
came with METAL stands. I doubt that the metal stands would have offered
any audio benefits in this price range, but in the past they were a solid
trademark of quality that I appreciated much.
Everyone is invariably interested
in the subwoofers that come with any speaker set. I was somewhat disappointed
that BA chose not to redesign a new type of subwoofer for their latest speaker.
As I mentioned earlier, Back of the Subwoofer the BA4800s use a similar
subwoofer to the MediaTheaters, basically an 11.5lb front ported 6.5” subwoofer
with some ventilation grilles at the back (presumably for the heatsink that
keeps the amplifiers cool). The enclosure is probably MDF (medium density
fibre) board, so I was reasonably assured of its flexion and acoustic properties.
Boston Acoustics’ custom is NOT to disclose any power specifications with
their products, so I couldn’t tell you exactly how much juice powers the
whole set, but from tests it does seem significant – besides, BA claims
a healthy 106dB maximum SPL (sound pressure level) at 0.5m, which is plenty
loud for a personal multimedia set. I never did much appreciate the design
of the MediaTheater subwoofer – I was more a fan of down firing subwoofer
designs, so I was wondering how this one would fare by comparison.
Since one of the biggest reasons
to pick up a 4.1 speaker set is for better gaming immersion, I started my
testing with some games. Amongst my test suite were classics like Half-Life
(arguably one of the best early A3D games) and Unreal with newer titles
like Heavy Metal FAKK2, Diablo 2, KISS Psycho Circus and others to throw
in a mix of sounds and gaming music. As mentioned earlier, the controls
include a surround effect knob, which is a little confusing to me, because
I wasn’t sure whether the knob increased the volume of the rear speakers,
or did some other algorithmic change to the distribution of audio signals.
Regardless, I played with the surround effect until I was satisfied, which
often meant cranking the surround knob up to near max.
