Listening Experience

Music
Our first listening test was to play the title track from Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album. Due to the age of the recording and the production choices (a Wall of Sound type recording) many speaker systems suffer from making the track sound muddy. This did prove to be the case with the FX4021 speaker system (when we first installed it) and at default the output was average at best. Playing about with the controls resolved this issue and specifically enabling the "Loud" setting garnered a huge improvement. The sound with this setting is a lot more defined and has considerable depth. We wanted to test something acoustic with good soundstaging and "Crash" by Dave Matthews was on our shortlist. With this type of music we found the default settings were best and the clarity of the audio was excellent. A very rich, warm environment was produced by the acoustic guitar and even the sound of fingers moving on the frets was reproduced accurately.

Games
Half Life 2 was the first situation in which selecting both Loud and SFX on the control module was beneficial to the sound. The Loud setting created a much more realistic sounding environment as there was more clarity to the voices and some nicer environmental sounds such as vehicles. The SFX widened the sound field sufficiently so that explosions and gunfire on the left of the screen were noticeably more prominent on the left speaker and with right sided sounds, the same was true.

Project Gotham 3 features great engine noise and decent music tracks which play in the background. Using the bundled L/R Phono>3.5mm converter we attached our Xbox 360 to the FX4021 to find out how the system handled this title. The results were excellent, particular highlights were some of the subwoofer rumblings when revving the meatier cars in the game. Once again it has to be said that the Loud setting was beneficial to the overall sound when gaming.

Film
We tested with Loud mode again, The Matrix lobby scene was best without the SFX setting and the music was suitably thumping whilst gunshots were sharp and the sound of empty shells hitting the floor were very precise even with the other action going on.

Moving to the "Are You Ready For War" speech from Braveheart, which relies very much on dialogue moving across speakers and sourcing from multiple directions, we found that the SFX mode added some extra width to the audio which made the voices much clearer. The other real highlight from this section was the rumbling of the English army approaching with a thunderous effect created by the subwoofer as the horses/infantry approached.