WhiteFireDragon

when people say bass, it can mean both. they can refer to the tangible subwoofers, or the low frequency sound

PunterCam

I've had my x5500's for a week or so, and they're pretty nice. For gaming and regular pop and rock music - anything with not much mid infact - will sound great. The problem with them is the mid, cos its rubbish. It sounds really thin and nasty, orchestral strings sound horrible. I'm using the internal computer EQ program to scoop as much of it out as poss, it's really not nice. Like somone has said though, you could change the speakers, it's just regular speaker cable, and as long as you matched whatever the resitance of the output is, and found some speakers that wanted about 65watts rms, you'd be happy.

I'm running an optical cable from my mac, and it all works nicely. The controller lets you balance the amount of sub, centre and surround you want, so you can change it to fit your room easilly.

It's a lovely little system, but I've read it's pretty fragile. Touch wood this one lasts.

jds21

The G51s are designed for PCs... I have a set and they sound tremendous... I only have a small room so i decided aginst the Z-5500s because they were overkill. The G51 sound very clear and they do not distort very easily providing that the sound is coming from a good source, if you have these speakers for your PC, make the most out of them with a good sound card... such as the Soundblaster X-Fi series

I fyou want to spend less, I can assure you, you won't be disappointed with the G51 unless you want them VERY VERY loud (as in, you can hear it down the street)

newguy5

treble and bass are just frequencies. a subwoofer is a speaker that has a crossover built in to it. a crossover is simply a filter that only allows signals of 80hz and less to pass through--80hz and less are your notes that are considered "bass."

subwoofers and/or amps are also built with crossovers that have slopes. a standard slope, like 12 db/oct, basically scales down a note that is played above 80hz by 12db every time it reaches an octave. the steeper the slope (6 db/oct), the less bass that will come through the speaker, but it's not really less, it's just more bass and less mid-range.

problem is, most people will turn their crossover to 120hz or more (for their subwoofers) so their subwoofer is actually playing music, and you can actually hear people sing if you put your head to the subwoofer. this is just bad mixing and a true subwoofer should rarely play frequencies above 80hz.

of course with these types of speakers you don't have that option to adjust your crossover. i've got years of experience building car systems and you can manually adjust those things when building car systems. but, i just wanted to give you a clearer understanding of what bass is and why subwoofers play it.

subwoofers are just speakers built to handle those low frequencies and they are built in boxes so that they vibrate and you can "feel" them. you take a 15" 2000 watt sub out of a car enclosure and play it and you won't feel any bass. put it back in a case and in the back of a car and you'll go deaf. bass resonates because of the enclosure it's in and buying a system with a subwoofer will only just give you a more resonant and clear bass.

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MosIncredible

Everything newguy said is basically what needs to be known about subwoofers coming from another expert on audio.