Creative Inspire 5.1 5300 > Reviews (8)

After recently getting a new laptop and finding that the inbuilt 5W speakers were absolutely awful, so i decided to connect these speakers to the laptop. Having an overall output power of 48Watt they were surely going to be better than what i had.

Creative are one of the most well known makers of speaker systems and it was with this background that i bought them for around £100 a couple of years around.

The setup is 5.1 surround sound (although only 2.1 works with my laptop but the whole system does work on my brothers PC). There are 5 satellite speakers, each of which are wired and have an output of 6W. For this output they are reasonably small, being only 4" tall and 3" deep. Each one supports 2.5" speakers cones and is surrounded by a black plastic casing. The 5" subwoofer is wood-encased and has an adjustable knob on the back to change the amount of bass on the sound. All of the speakers are attached to the subwoofer via RCA outputs and are all labeled into separate slots, to make things easier. The fromt speakers have 6FT cables and the rear speakers have 16FT cables which allows you to keep them a good distance from each other and spread over a large ditance, enhancing the surround sound experience.

The volume does get pretty loud and is controlled by a wired remote which can adjust the balance aswell as the volume and also allows you to turn the system on and off. Despite the high volumes, the sound does loose clarity at high volumes which i do not use often, but could cause a problem to some people.

As yet i have only used these speakers for games, especially Unreal Tournamnet and Fifa, and the do a brilliant job but i would guess that they would not perform aswell as a home theatre because the quality is not perfect.

At the price that i got them for they have done a brilliant job and cannot fault them for their performance and although they are not the best looking (Unlike the Creative I-Trigue - absolutely amazing looking system) they serve their purpose.