When there is no music/sound piping through the speakers, turning the volume up more than 1/4 of the total causes some very noticeable hissing noise. Once music/sound is going however, the hissing disappears and these speakers do provide good sound even at the 1/4 setting. But I had to turn up the subwoofer bass to almost 75% of its capacity before noticing anything from the subwoofer.

So while I agree the sound can be good, I tried it out with my music CDs and on the Dungeon Seige game. I now had an Audigy, Inspire 5.1, and a game that all supported EAX. I played for about 2 hours, but did not notice anything differently than with my other speakers.

I finally came to the conclusion that this extra center speaker isn't going to get used unless there is this 5.1 sound decoding available in the source media (ie, from DVDs). Other than that, you are getting just 4 speakers + subwoofer in use, and EAX sound didn't use this center speaker and didn't sound any different than on my Klipsch.

The Audigy manual says there is a way to use that extra center speaker with regular music but doesn't go into details and the clues it gave didn't help.

So I recommend these speakers as an inexpensive choice if you dont already have 4.1 or 5.1 speakers. If you want more power, consider the Logitech Z560 or even more power, then try the Klipsch Promedia 4.1. But if you are just considering upgrading from some other 4.1 speakers for gaming, it's probably not necessary. For watching DVDs on your PC? Maybe you can also if you really plan to watch enough DVDs on your PC to make it worthwhile...just remember to make sure your sound card can support the Dolby Digital 5.1 format.

Tip: If you have the Audigy card (and probably others too) but only 4.1 speakers, you can achieve this "5.1" speaker setting by plugging in another comparable speaker to that "center speaker" port on the card..that's basically what the Creative Inspire 5.1 set does. Then change your software setting to 5.1.