Creative Inspire T2900

If you have no intention of watching DVD movies on your PC, but you like to listen to music while you work, then a set of 2.1 speakers should suit you. There's little chance of wheeling your office chair over the cables and you won't have satellites getting in the way.

Creative has styled its new Inspire T2900 speakers to look like the other members of the Inspire T family. Curiously, it has only rated the two satellites at 6w each, compared to the 8w of the T5400 and T7700 sets.

In addition the sub-woofer is a 17w unit, so the maximum rated output for the T2900s is just 29w, which is fairly feeble.

Once we connected the speakers they looked rather smart on our desk with the sub-woofer tucked out of sight and the remote control close to hand and ready for action. Creative rather grandly calls the wired remote an 'audio control pod', as it controls volume and tone.

It comes with a mini-jack for headphones and Creative's own M-Port for connecting its own range of mp3 players.

When we played back a variety of music we were rather unimpressed. The speakers had to be cranked up close to maximum, which made Windows noises unpleasantly loud, while bass control was rather crude. We set it to 'slightly on' and left it there to avoid excessive booming, but that was a poor compromise. Guitar rock and jazz sounded acceptable, but far from great.

We found that male vocals and acoustic guitar brought out the best in these speakers, but that's not saying much.

On the plus side there's no hiss, click or distortion but these speakers are far too quiet and, at £69.99, they are overpriced, making the Creative Megaworks 250D or Acoustic Energy Aego2 look highly desirable.

Contact: Creative
http://europe.creative.com

Specifications:

• Satellites: 6w: RMS
• Sub: 17w RMS
• Signal to noise 80dB
• Frequency response 40Hz-20KHz