Creative Gigaworks S750 7.1 speakers review

Full Review

The Creative GigaWorks S750 is a 7.1 speaker system for your PC. Offering one centre, two front, two side, two rear, and one subwoofer the system purports to engulf you in sound from all directions.

While the speakers you get with a new PC system are normally satisfactory for hearing the windows start up and shutdown jingles, the majority of them are rather tinny and not capable of coping with surround sound DVDs or games. Creative’s answer is to upgrade the set to give yourself THX approved sound that will bring your DVDs, games and music to life.

The GigaWorks S750 also has an up-mixing facility that will take your 5.1 or 6.1 content - i.e. your standard DVD sound quality - and turn it into 7.1 surround sound so you utilise your speakers to the fullest.

To get the most out of this system you really have to invest in a soundcard capable of supporting 7.1 speakers (roughly £100). Once you have that though, the result is very impressive. The sound quality was capable of coping with everything we threw at it and the additional side speakers surprising made a big difference, especially when playing games - we tested it with Unreal Tournament and the action seemed to come from everywhere, especially when rockets fly past your head without killing you and you hear the missile’s jetwash.

Every pair of speakers’ volume can be individually set - ie front, rear, side, and sub - and all via the volume control station or an enclosed remote control.

With so many speakers came a lot of wire (which may not be to some tastes) but there was plenty in the box of varying lengths to let us place the speakers where we wanted. Better still, all the speakers where supplied with stands.

Verdict

With Media Centre PCs slowly making their way into the market place this speaker set will certainly accompany any system and user wanting to be engulfed in sound and engulfed they will be. A great sound, and easy installation makes this a good product to invest in if your looking for top notch sound. We had two qualms really - one was the price. To get the most out of this system you need to invest in a soundcard as well and that will eventually put the price up to around the £430 mark making this too expensive for most of us and beginning to compete with hi-fi manufacturers’ budget speaker sets. The other was the amount of cabling, but then with eight speakers (seven and the sub) you’ve got to expect this. All we need now is someone to invent wireless speakers that are powered by the base station and not batteries and this would be as good as they get.

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