Digital Home Thoughts: Orb Audio: Do These Small Speakers Measure Up?

Where The Rubber Meets The Road: Sound Quality


Figure 17: I started my audio testing out with something loud and proud: Nickelback, a band that hails not far from where I live.

So we've established that the Orb Audio speakers look great, assemble easily, and are great value for the dollar compared to other products you'd find in a retail store. But how do they sound? In a word, excellent. You need more than that? OK, keep reading...

The very first DVD I put in was Nickelback: Live At Home. It's a live concert DVD with great-sounding audio, a vibrant live audience, and a very raw sound that isn't overly processed like many modern live pop concerts. Nickelback isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the concert DVD did a great job of testing the speakers, especially the sub-woofer. I tested both the Super Eight and the Uber Ten, and both delivered thundering bass from the first note that Mike Kroeger hit. Music? Check. Movies? Next.

A few months back, my wife and I watched all three Lord of the Rings movies, the extended versions, in a single weekend. Since I knew I was going to be reviewing the Orb Audio speakers, I paid special attention to scenes with dynamic sound for testing later. In LOTR: Fellowship of the Rings, the Council of Elrond meeting has dialogue with little to no background sound, and it was all dialogue was crisp and clear. There's a moment where there's a brief bass sweep, and it was thumping but not overpowering. In LOTR: Fellowship of the Rings, the scenes in the Mines of Moria had fantastic audio. As they explore Moria, the individual footfalls of characters could be heard clearly through the music - something I don't recall hearing from my previous set of speakers. I think that has a lot to do with the surround channels being just as strong as the centre and left/right channels. The entrance of the cave troll was accompanied by thunderous footsteps that sounded booming yet did not cause any rattling of the sub-woofer - the bass remained tight. In the scene where the intrepid heroes are surrounded by goblins scaling down the columns of stone, I could clearly hear sounds that were previously muffled; individual scrapes and clanks could be distinguished easily from the background noise and music. In the scene where the Balrog begins chasing the heroes, the male vocal chanting had great surround displacement, wrapping me in the audio. The emergence of the Balrog was accompanied by thunderous footsteps that were rendered beautifully by the 10 inch sub-woofer - watching the same scene over again with the 8 inch sub-woofer, it performed nearly identically to its bigger 10 inch counterpart.

Next I popped in a classic: Top Gun, which features a Dolby Surround soundtrack and audio that's more than two decades old. In the aerial scene at the beginning of the movie, when Maverick's F-16 peeled away from Cougar's, the wake was extremely crisp and clear. In the scene where Maverick arrives at Miramar on his motorcycle, the 10 inch subwoofer provided a noticeable boost in bottom end for the rocking '80s Kenny Loggins tune. Even the off pitch warbling of Tom Cruise singing You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling was somehow clearer through the Orb Audio speakers - though that may not be a good thing. I also checked out Dream Girls on HD-DVD to hear how the Orb Audio speakers handled not only modern, high bit-rate audio, but also how well they worked with my Xbox 360 - and the Motown licks that make up much of the music in Dream Girls. As you can probably guess by now, the Orb Audio speakers handled this movie without a problem.

Throughout the audio testing, I was struck by one thing: the Orb Audio speakers are louder than our previous speakers. We would typically listen to movies with amp set between 25 and 28; equivalent volume with Orb Audio speakers was more around 35 on the amp (the lower the number, the quieter the amp volume level).