Antec Soundscience Rockus 3D 2.1 Speaker System
Simon Telford / 13 years ago
Now taking a look at what could be considered as the most important part of a speaker system, the volume control. From the top of the control we can see the top section rotates, and can also be pressed down to mute the speakers.
The button at the front allows you to switch modes. If you press and hold the button for ~5 seconds the Antec Soundscience speakers will switch the Optical source. Pressing the mode button once will switch it between Music mode and 3D mode.
As you can see the Soundscience branding is very simple, but does look quite smart.
On the other side of the v0lume control we can see that Antec have gone down the standard line of using an 8-pin connector for the control. The other end of this cable plugs into the back of the Subwoofer.
This cable is a fairly short length but is hopefully long enough to have the volume control on your desk even with the subwoofer on the floor.
Moving to the satellite speakers themselves, we can see that they are fairly chunky and are very much made up of quite a large barrel – this is very unusual but does aid in producing the ‘3d’ sound.
The satellite speakers come pre-installed on their stands so can be set-up very easily – they do unfortunately point upwards at a fairly sharp angle, and so presumably are designed to be used with a TV stand more than on top of a computer desk.
From the front we can see the mesh cover that protects the speaker cone and should reduce the likelihood of these speakers being damaged.
On the back of the speakers they have kept it very simple with a single jack, making it very easy to plug these speakers in.
While on the subject of cables, we can see Antec have chosen to take a compromise of using the jacks for the speakers but using a standard speaker connection to plug into the subwoofer, which is a bit fiddly to connect but this is the industry standard for Hi-Fi and other speaker systems. Of course, they have gold-plated the connectors, but we would expect this from most non-budget speaker systems.
Moving to the best bit of any speaker system, the subwoofer, which is to say the least, fairly large – it is a full 35.1 cm’s high, and nearly 20cm’s wide. While not the largest, it is certainly one of the larger 2.1 subwoofers on the market.
On the reverse is where all the magic happens, or at least, where everything gets plugged in.
A close-up reveals the speaker connections, as well as the audio inputs, bass control, and the connector for the volume control.
The other side of the subwoofer has the power switch and power cable.
The power cable is of a sensible length especially as you are unlikely to want to use speakers this size too far away from a mains socket.
There is nothing exactly special about the design of the subwoofer, at least from the outside.
Also included is a standard 3.5mm throughput cable which is of course gold plated.
They also include a 3.5mm to stereo rca’s. We are slightly unsure why you would need both cables (as the input is the same) but it does allow you to use two different sources, and in theory this cable might give better quality sound.
Instead of including a manual, there is a single A4 – sheet of paper which covers the basics of installation.