Perfectly Adequate PC Speakers

Fifty bucks buys this powered speaker system. It's got every feature you want in basic, powered speakers - 2 desktop speakers, and a foot-rest/sub-woofer.

It only costs about 68 watts to run, so in an energy-conscious environment, you can think of it as about as draining as a desk lamp.

Now, don't get me wrong - these things aren't junk. The design is stylish, yet subdued; and the construction is solid and long-lasting.

The two desktop speakers have nice curves and little, lighted, blue podiums. These days, it seems like everybody is doing this blue-light thing.

The sub-woofer is totally safe as a foot rest. It even has a very solid steel grate over the exposed speaker.

One caveat - there's no volume control on this thing. It totally relies on whatever it's plugged into to adjust the volume. This is an excellent example of an application in which one of those in-line volume controls stuck to the the keyboard with velcro would be in order.

One of the excellent extras this system has in the box is an RCA adapter. They call it a video game adapter, but it's just a little cable that adapts between a regular stereo's Red/White RCA adapters. The box suggests plugging this into a satellite receiver, but if, at some point you decide to throw your PC in the trash and never use it again, you can still keep the speakers, plug 'em into your stereo, and zone out on something like Natalie Merchant's Tigerlilly.

Looking at how solid these speakers are, and how few extras there are to go wrong - I think I'll still have them several years from now... plugged into my PC, plugged into my Dish, plugged into something.