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Written by Milos Jevtic
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Saturday, 11 April 2009 |
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Page 1 of 2  How many times did you wish to bring speakers along with your notebook on a business trip or vacation so you don’t have to use headphones when you are into enjoying in your music collection or good movie sound? New notebooks do have good speakers but they always sound “bucket-ish”. In case you ever carried with yourself speakers you know that a lot of problems came from a lot of cables that you needed to carry around and of course necessity for an power socket. Logitech recognized this problem and created solution for similar problems. This time we got in our test lab Logitech speakers under the code name: Z-5.
Slim and tall, extremely elegant by appearance and with minimalistic design, Z-5 had won our sympathies from the start. Z-5 are completely black with small grey stripe at the bottom just to break blackness monotony. Because of these external characteristics Logitech Z-5 looks very like as attractive and exclusive product. One of the first details that we noticed is their low weight which was its good and bad side effects. Low weight is good in case you plan to carry them a lot around but on the other hand it doesn’t raise the hopes when it comes to sound quality, but let’s not jump the gun on that issue.
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Speakers are made out of quality plastic that has piano finish and as such can be used as fingerprint collector. On front side is present small Logitech logo as only decoration. Upper section is wrapped in black speaker mash cloth as speaker protection from sharp objects and dust.
On back side are present, as expected, all connectors and in this case there are only two: 3.5mm jack for earphones and connector for second speaker. Since Logitech Z-5 are USB speakers they don’t need power adapter or power socket, but instead they are powered true USB connector. All you need for these speakers to function is one free USB connector.
Since this is 2.0 speaker system, packaging is not big. Besides speakers we found audio extension cable (1.2 meters), manual, CD with additional software and drivers and small remote controller that we didn’t expect in this product class. Remote controller is very small but it looks as quality piece of hardware. Reactions to commands of remote controller are little bit slow (lag-ish) but that cannot be recognized as serious problem. Speakers are controlled only with this remote controller because speakers don’t have any controls or knobs on them.
It became tradition lately that small speakers should have some sort of the audio enchasing technologies and Z-5 are not an exception. Logitech uses “Omnidirectional stereo acoustics” technology to simulate surround sound which is not just another PR small talk. In each speaker there is one driver at the front and back side that really does create something that resembles surround sound. Of course this can never sound as true 5.1 speaker system but effects of Omnidirectional stereo acoustics are not that bad.
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MultiMedia 
