Dolby Speakers: 5.1 Channels, and Everything's On

We test two 5.1-channel speaker sets, one with true Dolby sound and the other with an emulated sixth channel.

Joel Strauch, special to PCWorld.com

Dolby Digital 5.1 has become the de facto sound standard for home theater. While it represents the high end among sound solutions for PCs--with an appropriate sound card and speakers totaling $500 or more--the proliferation of DVD drives, MP3 music files, and games with Surround Sound have made the standard a viable choice for audiophiles. If you can justify it to your wallet, consider one of the two speaker sets we tested recently: one from Creative that offers true six-channel sound, and the other from Boston Acoustics, which provides a "virtualized" sixth channel. Both pour out auditory ambrosia, but the pricier Creative speakers sound just a little bit better.

True Dolby 5.1-channel sound is piped through six separate channels: front left, front right, center, rear right, rear left, and a subwoofer (that's the .1 in the standard's name) for deep bass. Boston Acoustics' $300 Digital BA7500 looks like a standard four-speaker set plus a subwoofer. However, the speakers accept digital coaxial input (one of the principal types of connections for digital components), so if you connect them to a six-channel sound card, the front two speakers will not only produce front-left and front-right channels but they'll also produce a virtual center channel.

By comparison, Creative's $350 Cambridge SoundWorks DTT3500 Digital comes with six physical speakers--a center speaker, four satellites, and a subwoofer--as well as a Dolby Digital decoder amplifier. The decoder component houses the audio controls, including surround level, bass output, and center-channel volume level, and it lets you easily switch between different input types. For example, you can have analog input from your PC and optical input from a DVD player, and you can switch between the two modes with the included mini remote.

They've Got the Look

In terms of pure aesthetics, these speaker sets are in a dead heat. The nearly 10-inch tall, flat-panel Boston Acoustics satellites would look great on any desktop, especially one with a flat-panel monitor, while the small black Creative cubes (each about 4 inches square), don't look quite as spiffy but will complement most components. Although both sets took a while for us to put together, the Boston Acoustics speakers had the edge on setup. Their cables are color-coded, and their rear speaker stands, which support each of the two rear satellites, are easier to assemble. The Creative satellites also use stands, and they're more adjustable, but putting the Creative pieces together took longer because of the decoder and because only stickers were used to identify the cables.

But How Do They Sound?

When we finally faced the music, we were impressed. We played a variety of Dolby Digital 5.1 clips in digital mode with both speaker sets, and we were pleased by the ability of the five BA 7500 speakers to create the full six-channel experience. Sound moved smoothly from one speaker to the next, offering a movie theater-like experience. One clip from Dolby's Web site features a steam locomotive, which, crisp and thrilling, moved from our rear left and then seemingly went through us, finally exiting to the front right.

But no matter how great a virtual channel sounds, it can't quite compete with the sounds from Creative's actual center speaker. In a true six-channel system, the center channel delivers most of the vocal audio, so while the Boston Acoustics speakers deliver excellent Dolby 5.1 sound, the full six channels of the Creative speakers sound more real, with much clearer center sound.

In our four-channel and Surround Sound tests, both with music files and with ambient sound in games like Thief and Unreal Tournament, we gave a slight advantage to the Creative speakers. Both sets produced precisely placed 3D sound: Footsteps echoed on the cobblestones behind us in Thief, and sound cues allowed us to locate enemies above us and below us in Unreal Tournament. But the DTT3500 speakers delivered crisper sound. In addition, at very high volumes, we noticed a slight distortion from the Boston Acoustics set. (However, in fairness, if you listen to music at the levels required to produce that distortion, you'll probably damage your hearing.) On the other hand, the BA 7500 subwoofer got the nod for its bass, as it pumped out more powerful low-frequency sound.

Versatility

The controls for the BA7500 set are located along the bottom of the right-front speaker: volume, bass, surround volume, and balance. You can access the more extensive controls of the DTT3500 speakers through either the remote or the decoder. That flexibility seems helpful at first, but it could become tiresome when used with a desktop system: We often misplaced the tiny remote and simply reached over to the decoder to change settings (although we appreciated the remote when we used the Creative set with other components, such as our TV's DVD player).

While the BA7500 speakers offer only coaxial digital input, the Creative set lets you connect digitally in a variety of ways, including coaxial, optical, and S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface, a digital-output standard used by digital sound cards and other audio devices). The optical connectivity of the decoder makes the DTT3500 set an excellent choice for your DVD player, game console (such as the PlayStation 2), or portable music player, devices that often use optical output for Dolby Digital sound.

Neither speaker set will shame a home-theater sound system, (one with larger speakers and a high-end receiver), but they will work well as a second-room setup for PC-using audiophiles.

Both of these sound options are, well, sound options. You can't go wrong with either the flat-panel Boston Acoustics and their thumping bass or the versatile Creative speakers. But overall, we prefer the Creative set for the crispness of its true Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.