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My mom's got a 1990 Dodge Colt hatchback equipped with the factory Mitsubishi AM/FM radio with 4 stock speakers. I wouldn't exactly call it hifi, yet it's one of the most enjoyable ways to listen to public radio on the road that I've encountered. It doesn't have much bass, and it won't rock hard, but it seems to have unusually good basic tone without the need for a lot of EQ fakery.
And so it goes with the Swans S3W speaker system that I picked up the other week. I wanted decent speakers for my 24" iMac, but the computer itself occupies most of the available space and that seemed to rule out some of the current small speakers of the month, including the Johnblue and Audioengine 5. And while I was able to shoehorn in the Logitech Z-2300 satellite/subwoofer system into the space, it sounded pretty bad (I'm now using the modified Logitech subwoofer elsewhere, with pretty good results, but the Logitech satellites seem hopeless).
So my speaker choices seem to narrow down to the Swans or the Audioengine2s. I decided to try the Swans first, because they're built around a Tripath amplifier chip (the volume control thing with the blue light is a complete amplifier), and I assume that once stocks of that chip are depleted, there will be no more Swans S3W, at least not in this exact form. I found one (and only one) dealer with the S3W in stock, and that's The Audio Insider: Audio Magus has removed it from their site, and Newegg has no current listing for it.
It was a quiet day at the office when the Swans arrived, so I hooked them up to my G5 tower and set the satellites to either side of the 20" Apple Cinema Display. In that space, sitting on formica covered office furniture, the sound seemed lean and very airy, and that's normally not a combo that I care for too much. But there was something that I liked anyhow: There was nothing "absolute" about the sound, and it sure wasn't like a window to reality, or even a really good photograph of it. No, what it sounded like was a good charcoal sketch where a few squiggly lines of charcoal suggest a scene, and your mind fills in the details. For instance, just add the right hints of wood and rosin, and your mind says "Violin" without really having to analyze and interpret. The Swans seem to do a good job at NOT homogenizing the sound.
Back at home, the speakers are sitting on a lacquered pine shelf in a corner of the room. In this small space, they sound surprisingly full and rich without losing one iota of the colors which make it so enjoyable to listen to. I don't know how much of this is due to a difference in acoustics or equipment break-in.
I don't remember having so much audio fun for $59 before! I just ordered my second set of S3Ws from Audio Insider, so I now feel safe in talking about it ;-) Time will tell how well it works in my larger office space over the long haul. If worst comes to worst, I'm out $59 and perhaps get to try something by Nuforce, Johnblue or Audioengine, or even one of the larger Swans models.
PS: I've tried a bunch of other compact audio cheapies in the past, but they've tended not to stick around too long. These include:
Radio Shack CD-3400 CD player
Realistic Minimus 7 speaker
Realistic Optimus Pro LX-5 Linaeum
Tivoli Model 1 table radio
Of these, the original Tivoli Model 1 was probably the most to my liking, but it dished out it's sonic goodness in such tiny portions: Forget about filling a room with sound, it barely projected an arm's reach away. The Model 2 was supposed to address that but never sounded particularly magical to my ears. The Swans seem to fill the space with sound much more effortlessly.
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