Review: Sony SRS-DZ10 speakers

Sony’s latest 2.1 speaker set, the SRS-DZ10 certainly ticks all the boxes when it comes to style.

It’s a beautiful looking arrangement, finished in sleek brushed aluminium that carries over from the 25W cylindrical sub-woofer to the pair of 6W terminal speakers.

A cool blue light illuminates the sub for added impact, although this can be switched off in dark environments so that it doesn't distract from what's on the screen.

There’s a control box supplied that houses volume and bass controls, along with twin inputs so it's possible to can wire up both a dedicated source, such as a PC or television, and have one spare for occasional use with an mp3 player or other audio equipment.

Being a 2.1 setup, it’s better suited to PC users with multimedia content, but it would be a shame to stow such a nice looking unit under a desk. While it's not the most immersive surround sound kit for home cinema usage, the SRS-DZ10 would still be fine for adding a bit of oomph to your TV’s speakers, and it would certainly grace any room in terms of style.

In testing the speakers in a number of environments we found that it seemed more suited to games and audio playback; while the sound quality is decent enough, a well-tuned ear will notice that mid-range tones tend to get slightly lost, particularly at higher volumes and with a lot of bass. There isn’t a lot of control over fine adjustments to the audio either: a treble setting on the control box would have been handy for fine tuning.

If the source equipment has a graphic equaliser built in – most decent equipment should – better sound can be achieved from these speakers by tweaking the audio from there. These issues shouldn’t prove too much of a drawback for most users, then, and for anyone looking for something with a bit of aesthetic merit to complement a high-end setup the Sony DZ10 should do the job well. At around £90 they’re also reasonably priced.

If you like the looks you should find that with a bit of tweaking it’ll do justice to most audio sources.