Audio Performance

With all the hype behind the whole Sirocco line of speaker systems I already had certain expectations when I got the Crossfire speakers. The card I used for testing the Crossfire was the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum from Creative, this might be the best soundcard you can get at the moment.

Gaming

When buying a 4.1 system its for sure you will want to do some 3D gaming and take advantage of the positional 3D sound with the quad output mode. I played a variety of games from First Person Shooters, to Racing Sims, Sports games and RTS games.

In each one of the tests the speakers responded incredibly well, explosions and such sounded great, the subwoofer really played a very important factor here.

Although the way positional sounds behave is really up to the soundcard you are using, I must say the Crossfire are truly the best speakers I’ve used for gaming, sound is clear and crisp, here where quad output is really important, the Crossfire exceeded my expectations.

DVD Playback

As DVD drives become more and more popular on the PC, it was a very determining factor the quality of DVD audio playback we could get out from the Sirocco system.

I’m sure I won’t surprise any of you when I tell you what movie was the first one I put on the DVD-ROM for testing the Crossfire. The Matrix was definitely the first I movie I could think of, all kind of high quality sounds are on that movie which made it a perfect choice for testing.

I had a couple of friends around when I put the movie on, so I pumped up the volume a bit and the action got rolling… the “WOW!” Factor was very noticeable between all of us at that moment.

Music

For Music playback testing I threw a couple of MP3s and some CD music, I tested the speakers with all kind of music genre. Overall sound was very clean thanks to the high quality satellites.

The only kind of distortion I could hear when playing music came from the subwoofer, although that only happened on certain cases with certain kind of heavy music, the subwoofer distortion was noticeable at 90% of the volume level, not something you will notice on a normal condition of playback actually.

Some people might be curious about the background hiss, especially when using high volume levels. I’m glad to say that even in the highest volume possible, the speakers stayed very quiet.

Go to next page !