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Review 3 of 4
Price Paid:
$200.00
from ebay Summary:
When I saw this little system almost more than half a year ago in the store display shelf, I knew I had to have one. But the asking price of $350 forced me to walk away from it. Now that the price has dropped quite a bit, I got my hands on a bargain. I've had the JVC for more than a year and this unit is a replacement for the JVC. If the JVC is a little system that grows on you each day you use it, then this little Aiwa grabs you by the nose and makes you immediately fall in love with it. The multicolored display is mesmerizing and the selectable color around the jog dial and the CD slot can suit your colorful taste for a particular day. The speakers have an attractive shiny black piano finish. The vertical loading CD helps to make this system ultra small. It shines on my cramped desktop space.
This little has all of the functions you would need, everything from timer to surround. Although enticing, I would caution against using the Q-surround. It does indeed add depth to the sound stage. However, at higher volumes, you will hear the distortion and the echo. Use the BBE wisely because if you over-compensate for high frequencies, your will encounter fatigue of your ears and risk distortions. The same goes the T-bass. The sound produced by these speakers are pretty good for their size.
Now, on to the bad news. Compare to the JVC, the speakers on this one is more flimsy. Midranges do not fare as well on the Aiwa as the JVC, in fact I have noticed a dip at certain frequencies. Although this is a two way speaker, I think the JVC's full range is smoother and it is of no comparison to the TEAC. For a system this small, power is a precious resource. While the JVC has a sub sonic filter to block out the low frequencies that its speakers cannot handle, the Aiwa happily thumped the little woofers with the 20 Hz sine wave I gave it. I hooked it up to my subwoofer to add better low end response and avoid strain, only to discover that the subwoofer output has a low AC hum around 50-60 Hz, which means it came from the lack of a static shield or a poorly designed power supply, or it could mean the output impedance of the sysmte and the input impedance of my subwoofer has a big difference(which I highly doubt since both are stand line level impedance). To get around this hum problem and the lack of subsonic filter for the little speakers, I hooked up the speaker output into the speaker level input of my subwoofer and the Aiwa speaker to the high pass filtered output on my subwoofer(6 db / octave @ 125 Hz). This way, damaging low frequencies do not go to the speakers and the subwoofer does not put out the annoying hum when idling. I must say, this is a very disconcerting aspect of the system since using the line level output gives me alot more flexibility.
Now with all that said, I still think this is a great system. It does take some tweaking and experimenting to be able to integrate it well with a subwoofer. But it is worth every penny you spend on it. Now the only thing remains for me to find out is its durability. Only time will tell how well it stands up to long term use. Strengths:
style, functions, sound Weaknesses:
speakers, lack of subsonic filter, parasitic hum in the sub output, lack of line out Similar Products Used:
JVC FS-5000
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