There is a certain ?character? of the higher ranges that is not accurately reproduced by conventional cone speaker systems. If you?ve been in the same room as a guitarist during a recording session and then listened to the playback, you may have noticed that you can not only hear the music being played when its live, but also the technique -- the fingering and the picking or strumming -- all of the hand motions on the instrument make audible sounds when you?re standing there next to it. The recording, however, loses much of this subtlety. In fact, until I tested these speakers, I was of the opinion that these sounds were not actually making it into the recording. You can only imagine my surprise when I was playing various CDs through the Benwin
BW2000 Speakers and began noticing subtle sounds that I had never heard in the recordings before! This aspect, in my opinion, makes owning the
BW2000 worthwhile, especially at the $99 list price. That is, of course, only if you can run a pair of conventional speakers along with the
BW2000, to provide the lower ranges that the flat panels (and for that matter, the included subwoofer) cannot reproduce.
Installation is a breeze. You have to plug an AC adapter into the wall and into the Subwoofer unit, plug the pair of flat panel speakers into the subwoofer, and attach the bases to the flat panel speakers. Beyond that, the flat panel speakers simply plug into your sound card like normal speakers. I suggest, if possible, using a soundcard with at least four-channel stereo sound, and using the Benwin flat panel speakers for the front two channels, and some conventional speakers for the rear two. But more on that later...