If you are craving to get the last ounce of OOMPH from your TV or games on your PC, look no further! If you think your PC deserves better sound than what you are currently hearing through those crappy $10 speakers it came with or your TV speakers are all the time being pushed to their limits, you owe it to yourself to consider getting the Altec Lansing XA3021. I bought them for their looks but was pleasantly surprised to find out they do not just look good, but sound good too.

If you get distorted sound from either your TV or PC speakers than you surely are over driving them (cranking up the volume beyond the capacity of the speakers). Are you? The average television in American homes has 3 watts of power being dished out from its speakers. I am guilty on many counts having overdriven them unsuccessfully trying to achieve some sort of realism. The results? Nothing more than added distortion! Altec Lancing XA3021 are dubbed "Video Gaming & TV Audio" and they actually improve upon the sound coming out from those “run of the mill” speakers built into the television sets and give the needed boost to the low, mid and high frequencies. These speakers have a total of 40 watts (20 watts RMS), 30 going to the woofer and the satellites get 5-watts of power each. Not only are these speakers good for TV and PC but they are also compatible with Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo and GameCube. The high quality graphics from these consoles look even more impressive when the boost in audio is applied.

Altec Lansing’s Background

Altec Lansing Professional traces its heritage back to 1927, when Western Electric engineers supplied loudspeakers for the first talking motion picture, "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson. My first experience with Altec Lansing was the “Voice of the Theatre” speakers back in late 60’s. From the renowned ``Voice of the Theater'' speakers and the first high-fidelity home audio systems to the creation of the PC audio category, the brand has a long tradition of audio innovation. The company has sold more computer speaker systems, won more design and performance awards than any other PC speaker manufacturer. The innovation part is very much evident in the Altec Lansing XA3021 as well.


The Design

Most of the sub/sat systems that you come across are either square or rectangular boxes, which if I dare say it, look kind of boring. Altec Lansing XA3021 subwoofer, when standing upright, resembles a rocket. If placed with the speaker firing in front, it looks like a sub-marine. Short in stature, but boasting enough power to get your adrenaline flowing. The satellites, which are also an unusual design, perched on wired stands resemble more like the stainless steel microphones from long time ago (50’s).


Build Quality

The speakers are made from molded plastic. My main concern when I unpacked them was the rattling sound that similar priced subwoofers make when called upon to deliver the bass. During the sound quality evaluation I did not find the subwoofer to be producing any rattling sound. The unit has tiny rubber feet underneath them to keep from slipping from its position. The two satellites also made from molded plastic have matte silver finish on its grilles and are on elegant looking wired stands. They have small rubber rings wound on the wire itself to keep from slipping. This arrangement means these cannot be hanged on the walls but need to be placed on a flat surface. The wired remote supplied with the system is well built and has a nice volume control looking more like a jog dial with a good feel to it. Unlike a jog dial which keeps rotating in either direction this one actually stops at two points, 7-o’clock and 5-o’clock positions. The remote also has at its bottom, small rubber feet to keep it from slipping. To some, these small additions may be irrelevant but they do go a long way when the thing is actually put to use. Well thought out and practical designs are usually the results of years of experience in the field. Altec Lansing has been on the scene for good 70+ years and it shows when you take a good look at this system.

Altec Lansing has an ISO 9002 and SA8000 certified manufacturing facility in The People's Republic of China where these speakers were made. If it were not for the Chinese plant, keeping the price below $100 mark would be close to impossible. I found the overall build quality very much acceptable.

Using The System

The supplied QCC (Quick Connect Card) has photos and illustrations making things very easy for setting up quickly and without making any mistakes. The panel on the subwoofer has only one variable control knob, which is for setting the output level of the bass. You set it to your liking once and forget about it. Setting between 11-2-o’clock gives very reasonable bass. I would not recommend that it be turned to its maximum position; it can overwhelm the baby woofer so to say. All the inputs/outputs are RCA, albeit one, labeled auxiliary input which is a 1/8th inch stereo jack. Whatever you feed to this woofer make sure you are feeding from the line level of the source equipment. Some outputs on portable MP3 or CD players are not line level, that is to say they are amplified outputs, these may not sound very good because of distortion from the tiny amps built into them. They are meant to drive just the headphones supplied. So for clean sounding system, line level (passive outputs) is the way to go. If you have your DVD, VCR or any other source connected to your TV, you simply use the monitor output of your TV to connect to the subwoofer, that way you can switch between sources on your TV and get the sound from the XA3021 system. The stand-alone DVD, VCR and CD players all have line level outputs.

The satellites are magnetically shielded so you can use them near the TV or the Monitor but the subwoofer is not. Make sure you position the subwoofer away from the TV or monitor. Altec Lansing themselves recommend that you keep the subwoofer at least 2 feet away from TV or Monitor. It is always a good idea to place the subwoofer on the floor, that way the unshielded subwoofer will not interfere with either your TV or the computer monitor. Why is the subwoofer not shielded like the satellites? Well, to make the shielded speakers, two magnets of same specs and size need to be used back to back inside the enclosures to cancel out the magnetic field. This also results in lower efficiency and a larger enclosure. If the same method were applied to the subwoofer, the most important thing that would be missing would be – OOMPH, at the same time, the size of woofer would be bigger. The cost? You can surely figure that out yourself.

The satellites come with about 10 feet of captive wire terminated with RCA plugs for connecting to the sub. RCA plugs mean you can never accidentally connect them out of phase.

The supplied remote is wired (again with about 10 feet of captive wire for connecting to the sub). The remote also boasts two 1/8th inch stereo headphone sockets, which mutes the speaker output when you plug the headphone into them. It conveniently lets two people watch movies or play a console game without disturbing the other inmates. The remote has the power switch (switching the system on/off) a master volume control and three bass EQ buttons. The three EQ buttons on the remote ideally should have been labeled LOW, MID and HIGH for bass rather than TV, Gaming and Max-Base. I found the best setting for me to be Gaming or mid EQ setting with the variable control on the subwoofer at 1-o'clock position. The setting of course depends on the source material; having set my preference around the mid level I was able to switch the level from Gaming to TV (when I felt the bass to be a tad on the higher side) and from Gaming to Max-Bass (when I felt more OOMPH is needed) at the flick of a button.

With the XA3021 kit, you get a stereo RCA-to-RCA lead of reasonable length, and one RCA extension lead in case you need to set up one of the satellite much further from the sub than the other. If you want to use the 1/8th inch connector, or hook up either XA3021 input to a PC soundcard or other gadget with a 1/8th inch output socket, you'll need to buy a separate cable (an inexpensive purchase).


Sound Quality

It would be insane on my part to evaluate these speakers in the same fashion as high-end audiophile speakers costing several thousand dollars. I would certainly not use the Test Disk with Pure Tones nor I would use my Sennheiser HD 580 Precision Headphones, which I use for evaluating music for writing the music reviews. I will however compare them to the existing sound of my TV, which happens to be a Philips 29inch Real Flat Screen with Virtual Dolby surround and having built-in active subwoofer with power rating of 10 watts RMS and front firing stereo speakers with a power rating of 5 watts RMS.

I used some of the DVD’s (Fleetwood Mac – The Dance and James Taylor – Live at the Beacon Theatre) that I had reviewed earlier for sound quality evaluation. The first thing that struck me as different was that the sound stage was much bigger since the satellites were placed almost 5 feet away on either side of the TV, in other words a spread of ten feet. The bass compared to the TV was lower and louder. To be precise it went a little higher in terms of high frequencies and a bit lower when producing bass. This is exactly what the system is supposed to do. The system managed to generate decent loudness level overall and was enjoyable. The volume on the remote was cranked up fully and the bass was set for gaming. I also tried music only CD’s, one of them being Sting – Brand New Day. The sound quality from this particular disk through the system was not bad at all. It was not able to produce the lowest bass notes but whatever it was capable of producing was sounding pretty good overall. The system is rated by Altec to produce frequencies between 35hz-18khz. To be honest, I do not think any speaker system in this price category can faithfully reproduce the entire range specified. By no means this system is capable of producing very loud levels, nonetheless, whatever it was producing was more than satisfactory and I have no qualms about it.

Conclusion

Altec Lancing XA3021 is one of the most intriguing designs that I have come across in subwoofer/satellite speaker systems. The good thing is that it will not put a hole in your pocket if you decide to go for it. For more realistic and intense sound from your video console and movies on the DVD, you just cannot possibly go wrong with this stylish and capable 2.1 system, which I consider to be a bargain at under $100.


Recommended: Yes