Listening to Music with Desktop Speakers in 2021

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Tony: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Three Techs. I’m your host, Tony Tang. And I’m joined by Bob Fairbairn tonight. One of the other Three Techs. Hey Bob, how’s it going? 

Bob: Just fine, Tony. Good evening. How are you today?

Tony: doing well. Stephen’s not able to join us tonight, but we will catch up with him on another day. Today, we are going to continue our discussion about listening to music.

This series that we’re doing, we talked about just listening to music, using streaming services in one show. Then we talked about listening to music, using your headphones and earbuds and how to choose headphones and earbuds and what the differences are with the various designs. And tonight, I thought we would talk about listening to music, using speakers. 

Bob: Ah,

Tony: And I think you could go crazy with speakers. The sky’s really the limit, but I think for tonight’s discussion, maybe we should limit our discussion to smaller desktop speakers, something that is a little bit more practical and accessible to a wide your audience. 

Bob: Yeah, I think that’s good. And the big thing, I think people are doing these days. Trying to crunch too much time at the desk. And I don’t have time to listen to music and maybe we get some good speakers on the desk for their computer and they’ll get to listen to some more music and relax a little more.

Tony: Yeah.

it’s a nice thing to be able to relax when you’re at your desk and get a little break from, from work. Okay. Let’s talk about speakers and what people can consider when they’re looking at desktop speakers. Now, typically I think they would probably be connecting them to a computer. Maybe an external player, like their phone or smartphone or something like that. 

So given that scenario, what sort of speakers have you been looking at? Or have you tried. 

Bob: Well I have almost always used what’s called an active speaker, but before we talk about that, let’s talk about what you go to the big box store and buy. And so there’s typically on a phone, there used to be a, and on most laptops, there still is. Three and a half millimeter audio, Jack, that you can plug something in and then you get, you know, $15 or $25 worth of speakers.

And they plug into the wall and they make noise. 

Tony: They make, a sound,

Bob: They make, sounds sounds will come out of them, 

Tony: Right. 

Bob: their ability to reproduce. Quality sound or their ability to reproduce music is less than stellar, but it’s a start it’s better than many of the speakers in laptops. Laptops are notorious for bad sound. Some monitors have speakers. Most of those are . Okay. Some people have all-in-one computers where the speakers are in. Some of those are actually pretty good. So it varies. but most of the time I really feel if you’re going to listen to music, you want to have a pair of speakers that give you good sound and you don’t have to a big budget to do that. You’re not buying a car here. You’re buying desktop speakers, so,

Tony: Right. So let’s define what we mean by good sound. To me, it means that I can hear the sound clearly.