GigaWorks T40 Speakers

Rating: (3.5 / 5)

These speakers are probably the most stylish I’ve seen in a while. I like the tall, sleek design and the fact that they’re designed to be displayed with or without the face plate. Personally, I think they’re cooler without it. I have an open-air desk so I had no problem handling their height, but some people may find that they’ll be too tall, so watch out. But they’re thin, and they’ve got this slight angle backward that not only lends to the design, it projects the sound up towards your head.

Setting these speakers up was a snap. They just plugged right into my sound card and away I went. I installed these speakers on my 32-bit Vista, 64-bit Vista, and 32-bit XP boxes.

These are good general-use speakers for your PC, but I wouldn’t look to them for high-end use. For starters, I didn’t like the power button being in the back. It’s too hard to get to and I don’t keep my speakers on all the time, so I constantly had to feel around on them to turn them on and off.

As well, they didn’t get nearly as loud as I hoped they would. Especially for their size, I thought they would have more output than they actually do. And there’s also no option to pair them with a subwoofer if you want to.

All that said, the sound that did come out of them was great and there was only mild distortion at the highest output. I also tried them on my TV and while they lent a little to the equation, they don’t make a huge different in getting over the noise coming from the kids, dog, and company. They just don’t have the kind of output you need for quality TV watching, and the sound doesn’t carry well enough to make it across a large room.

The Bottom Line: So while these speakers are nice general-use speakers, I wouldn’t look to them for serious gaming or rich multimedia like movies. They’re good-looking speakers that won’t do you wrong on your PC, but don’t look to them to be able to handle real TV loads. But if you’ve got normal PC speaker needs including music, games, etc. you’ll have few complaints with these guys. The only complaint you’re likely to have is the placement of the power switch which is on the back.