In a world that is awash with 5.1 surround sound speakers it makes a pleasant change to be faced with a set of 2.1 speakers such as this.

The two satellites that sit on your desk look very stylish, however they are a little on the tall side at 19cm. Unusually, they are finished in stainless steel, although it looks similar to aluminium, with a tweeter stacked above two mid-range drivers.

The subwoofer is an understated black cube with a grille on the front. As the sub will live out of sight under your desk or tucked in a corner of the room this rather suggests that Philips spends its cash where it will be seen.

Philips has joined the two satellites together so you only have a single jack to plug into the subwoofer. The company has also made the unusual decision of connecting the wired remote to both the subwoofer and the sound card in your PC, so the remote is the conduit for the audio signal.

Although there's a rocker power switch on the back of the subwoofer, along with a rotary bass volume control, most of the action takes place on the remote control which has an On/Off button, a blue power LED and a rotary volume control.

The volume control is a strange item that is larger than you might expect and, while it has a reference line, it's tricky to work out where you are in the volume range. We found the On/Off button action was very light and managed to inadvertently turn the speakers off on a number of occasions.

In total the speakers are rated at 50W RMS but we have no information how this power is split between the subwoofer and the satellites. We speculate that the subwoofer is 20-25W and each satellite has 12-15W distributed between its three drivers.

Audio quality is very satisfactory and the volume is certainly up to the job of PC work. For fun we plugged them into a laptop and used them in a home cinema set-up with a projector to watch The Simpsons, and were very happy with every aspect of the speakers apart from their quirky configuration, as we didn't much like the remote control.

At the time of writing these speakers are yet to go on sale in the UK so we have to work with an SRP of £80 which is rather expensive. If they come down to £60 they'll be well worth considering.

Verdict
The SPA9300 speakers are typical of Philips products in so many ways. They look stylish, cost slightly more than you'd like to pay, perform well enough and have an unusual design that makes you wonder why Philips always plays by a different set of rules to the rest of the industry. For all that, though, they're not bad.

Company: Philips

Contact: 0906 1010 017

Tags: subwoofer philips surround sound personal computer audio business speakers electronics