Remembering the 80's. A useless PC speaker review.

Huge haircuts. Interior design involving geometrical patterns of red and yellow stripes, and black and white squares. A-ha. Commodore 64. Random uses of the word Turbo. Little books with stickers to put in your school diary (mostly involving the word "Turbo"). Not trying to use the number 2 as a replacement for the words "two" or "too". That is what the 80's were all about. That, and ghetto blasters. Ghetto blasters usually involved a cassette deck (or two next to each other if you were cool, or two behind each other if you were amazingly cool and had a Sharp ghetto blaster), blinking lights, and were easily spotted because of their sheer size. There is no such thing as a small ghetto blaster, no way. Huge is the word, and the bigger the ghetto blaster, the better the sound. There is even a physical explanation behind this, the waves have to go somewhere away from the actual speaker, which only works if the speaker is wrapped in a big, closed, box.

Where was I. Oh, then came the invention called "auto-reverse". In the day and age where the CD is already on its demise, this might need some explaining. Back in the days, music was to be heard either on a vinyl disc, which was inconvenient when being out and about, and could easily be scratched. Or you could get the music on small little device called "audio cassette tape". This was a piece of plastic with two rolls of tape in it that smelled funny. The best ones came from BASF. You would buy them empty and copy music from friends on it with their 2-speed tape copier. Stupid friends would buy Phil Collins tapes in the store. Life was simple, but you had to work for it. Auto-reverse ruined it, though. People you would now call "emo" would use it to listen to the Smiths over and over again, without even having to move their hands. This stopped the essential break you need when listening to the Smiths. The auto-reverse generation is now getting in power, and look what a mess the world is becoming. Just so you know where it all began.

After auto-reverse came the CD player, the mp3, and all other kinds of crap. People forgot about the basic theories of good sound, and invented lots and lots of stupid small speakers and did as if that delivered some great sound (sometimes this crap was called Bose, sometimes called 2.1,5.1,7.1,whatever.1). Of course, simple economics can tell you that one can never create 3 good speakers for the same price as 2 equally good speakers. As the amount of money one would spend on speakers would probably not change much, this meant that people started buying a lot of crappy speakers, thinking they were just as good as a few good speakers. Eventually, it would get pretty hard to even find a pair of good speakers, especially for a computer.

These times are over.

Being a person of the 80's, and looking for an improvement of my old and loyal labtec speakers, I searched for the best (I mean of course: biggest) computer speakers around, only to find that these actually exist. The actively-powered 20 watt rms Jaytec PHA-30 speakers, magnetically shielded for those who care. Only 60 euros poorer and a few days later (free shipping in Germany!) they arrived, in a box big enough to fit a flexible person. The goodness already started with the accompanying cables: a power cable without grounding, a thick cable to connect one box to the other, cinch-to-cinch and cinch-to-mini-jack cables to connect the speakers to anything that outputs sound. This starts off pretty well...

The size of the speakers is hard to describe, unless I would actually have measured them, which I didn't. They might way about 4 kilograms each, I have no clue. Below is a blurry picture of the boxes with next to them the almost 10 years old CD "much against everyone's advice" from Soulwax. Be impressed:

As you can see, the boxes come with 2 10 centimeter woofers, one tweeter, an opening for air, a cover to reduce its dust and coolness, and an impressive set of controls. The MDF has a nice fake wood finish which looks classy. As a side note: at some point they also sold the PHA-20, which had one woofer less, and was a bit smaller because of that. A closer look at the controls on the right speaker (the left speaker only has the metal connectors for the speaker cable):


The connectors at the bottom can be screwed outwards, revealing a small opening for the cable to the other speaker, just like in a real amplifier. There is an "s-output", the use of which I don't know, and since the speakers are made for real men there was no manual whatsoever. There is an on-off button with a LED, a replaceable fuse, sturdy knobs for volume, bass, and treble. Input goes via the cinch connectors, like it should be. There is no power adapter, so the 220V cord goes directly into the speaker. There is also a warning sticker for idiots, and a quality control sticker from the poor Chinese guy who put these things together for the German-based Jaytec company.

And how does it look on the table? Well, pretty nicely! My monitor is from the time when a 20 inch CRT monitor was a rarity, and actually 20 inch CRT monitors are again a rarity, without ever not being a rarity. It is clear, the speakers make even Windows XP look manly. I wonder how they will fit with my white (!?) EEE...