pio

If you can get them properly spaced out, and intend to use the z5500 set, then by all means....go for a sound card for the fine tuning. If you're happy with it, a sound card will help. If you DO end up using both sets, make sure the speakers are placed in the same locations as closely together as possible. You'll end up with what, 2 front lefts, 2 front rights, and then a center and 2 surrounds. So on your desktop it'll be: FLFL C FR FR And then the surrounds above you like you mentioned left and right. Your surrounds SHOULD be parallel with your front left and right's too, just behind you. It is a tad better if you have like 4-6 ft between the left and right as well at a desk (varies depending on listening position). The further apart your left and rights are, the "wider" the sound stage will be. Go too wide and it doesn't sound right. Get too close together and you can't tell left vs right (becomes mono). If you're still after more, you know where we are. I'd hate to send you down the audio rabbit hole if you can't hear the difference anyway, don't care, or don't want the increased expense while you're building it up.

I hate to be the one to break it to you mate, but you don't exactly have the layout to do 5.1 or 7.1 with your desk in that location. You'd have speakers right in that area right in front of the couch, blocking the walkway there. 5.1 you need 2 speakers behind you Left and Right. 7.1 you need 4 behind you (well, 2 to your sides and 2 behind you). Sounds like you're going more after music and having a "fun" place to chill with some tunes to me. I'd strongly consider a decent 2.1 set. 2 speakers can easily fill a room with sound, and 1 good subwoofer can do the same as well. Also, most music is recorded in stereo anyway, so surround is just adding effects that the artist never intended to be there. Added bonus, easier to find proper locations evenly spaced for just 2 speakers left and right.

Very well put. Yup, the manufacturer's lie. I mean I guess they weren't lying since they state its at 10% THD, but 10% THD will kill your speakers REAL quick. THD = Total Harmonic Distortion. Distortion aka "clipping" is what kills speakers, not power alone (usually). You can get comfortable listening levels with just 1w at a desk if you have things tuned properly and are using efficient drivers. A subwoofer can be comfortable listening levels with as little as like 20-25w so long as its efficient. Take a tube amp vs a Class D digital amp for a good example. Tube amp puts out say 12w RMS per channel, and the Class D puts out 45w per channel. Guess what? The cleanliness of the Tube amp's sound COULD get just as loud as the 45w of Class D (all depends on the amps in question of course). As I said previously, there's a LOT of things to take into consideration with audio. But the basics are ACTUAL RMS power and resistance. Trying to keep at or under 1% THD is also important within your power range, as that's what will keep your sound clean, and it will NOT kill speakers.

I always think honesty is the best policy. So yes, if a company came flat out and stated, "we're raising our prices because we can", that says EXACTLY the same thing as "there's contamination (that's probably already resolved) so we're going to raise our prices because of that". They're blame shifting and being dishonest. I absolutely WOULD respect a company more if they were just blatant with what they're doing. I may not like the price increase, but I'd respect the honesty and transparency. ASSUMING we're right and they're doing this just for an excuse to raise the prices, yes it would've been a LOT more honest of WD and them to say, "Due to the current rising costs on everything, we are going to have to raise our prices on NAND products too". That's not too difficult. They'd get backlash, sure. But at least they're honest about their intentions. Keep in mind, I DO understand certain circumstances might arrise that cause certain products to go up in cost. I understood the flood price increase for the first few weeks. Just as I "would normally" have understood this one if it wasn't just the same crisis on repeat. This is where the transparency and honesty comes in.

Wish I could say the same. Last time I tried Linux, probably within the last year or so, it was a great experience. It just still wasn't QUITE there yet. Several games still didn't work, I still couldn't map a network drive without command line, and RDP doesn't work as smoothly on Linux obviously since RDP is Windows proprietary. I could overlook some of the games if the networking was a little easier and there was a decent RDP system in place to remote in with a desktop like experience that RDP provides. I've tried others like Teamviewer, and the experience just isn't the same.

Yes, you're seeing less than 200w RMS total as is right now. Power isn't everything, but it helps you get there. Speaker and amplifier manufacturers severely overrate their equipment power handling and output. Almost all of the cheaper manufacturers do. It gets fun when you start getting equipment that's underrated. Example, the Dayton Ultimax subs I mentioned earlier, they're rated at somewhere around 500-600w RMS each sub. I've sent approximately 2700w RMS to a pair of the 10's and they lived fine. Now, take a look at the Kicker subs again. (Note, they actually do sound pretty good). 400w RMS on a Kicker 12" sub is about all it'll take, and that's exactly what its rated for. You try to shove 500 or 600w down the Kicker, it'll smoke itself.

I read what you had written as rude after previous bad feelings. My apologies. We did go over all of this on page 1 though. Edited that part out.

There's a lot to go through with it, you look at the size, power ratings, frequency response, proper enclosure sizes, and the T/S specs can tell you a lot about a specific driver. It's been a while since I've shopped for subwoofers properly living in an apartment, but those are good things to research first. The T/S specs is the big one, I forget which one it is but one of them will tell you if a driver is best suited for a sealed enclosure or a ported enclosure. To answer your second question, moving air is moving air. I've used "house subs" in the car before and vice versa. The biggest difference is the resistance, car speakers in general are 4ohm and home speakers are generally 8ohm. A lot of subwoofers are 4ohm anyway though even in a house setup. The biggest thing when shopping for anything audio is power, followed by the resistance and recommendations on the amp. If you have 100w RMS @ 4ohm and you put in an 8ohm speaker, you'll only have approximately 50w RMS available instead of the full 100 (rough estimate). I recommended a sound card as my first recommendation here. The problem here isn't the source though since he's using optical. The problem is that he's looking to upgrade the z5500 + z625 set. As I've stated SEVERAL TIMES OVER in this very thread, yes a sound card WILL give some missing features to the Logitech sets, however all you're doing is replacing one DAC for another. And if YOUR receiver is lacking subwoofer crossover controls, that's on you. Every mainstream receiver released in probably the last 15+ years, from reputable brands has that very basic feature. There's only 2 controls you "need" for a subwoofer. That is gain and crossover. If you're bass boosting, you're doing it wrong mate......that's generally a sign you need a different sub and possibly more power. Also a good way to blow speakers.

There's soooooo many better options than Kicker even for car audio. Go look up the Dayton Ultimax. That's just one example. Many of them.

Geee, imagine that.

Dude, BeamNG is my favorite game!!! LOL I didn't seem to have any problems with my FX rig playing it at 1080p. I didn't spawn a whole bunch of stuff either though. At 4k, yeah it would be strained. My Ryzen 3600 struggles at 5120x1440.

No worries, we're always here to bounce ideas off of / ask questions. The joys of a forum community. If you're serious about doing a different enclosure, I will just advise you, do some reading and youtube videos on different box designs and what all it takes to tune them. There's a LOT to think about when doing an enclosure design, so much so that I gave up on it a long time ago and left it to the professionals lol. It's not hard, just a lot of math involved to get it just right. There's magnitudes of ways you CAN improve that z5500 subwoofer by just giving it different power and enclosure. I'm just not sure if it'll be worthwhile without the T/S parameters of it, dunno if those are available anywhere.

I have zero problems gaming on my FX 8350 rig at 1080p, so it still makes me happy to fire it up every once in a while. If you want some number chasing, K8 and K10 is almost more fun than FX is. K8 is DDR2 only though, but K10 would be fun. Finding a 960T that unlocks to an x6 and does 4.0GHz+. The chase to 4GHz was just as fun as the 5GHz chase lol. If you're after 5GHz, shoot for a x300 series FX. 4300, 6300, 8300. The 3 in the series shows that its Piledriver over first gen Bulldozer. Piledriver was more likely to do 5 than Bulldozer was.

You CAN yes. The z5500 is a decent 10" driver inside, IIRC it was manufactured by Tang Band. You COULD build it a new enclosure tuned lower and use either a subwoofer plate amplifier at around 250w RMS (being careful not to blow it with overpower), or a good solid desk or home theater sub amp. Many options, but you need a dedicated "sub amp" for it to be right so you have the proper controls over its frequency. What that enclosure would be, I would have no clue without getting the exact T/S parameters for that specific driver. I'd take a guess and say somewhere in the realm of 1.50 cubic feet tuned for like 30Hz should work, but I could be waaaaay off too.

Just in case it was missed earlier too...... Subs are meant to fill in the lower octaves that your main speakers cannot do. Even large tower speakers need assistance getting into the subsonic frequency range. The bass from your z625 set, honestly.....should be coming from your front main speakers (or most of it). Your front speakers SHOULD be able to get down to 80Hz with ease, and down into the 60Hz range if you can get some that do (pretty easy). 60Hz is where the z625 sub is tuned to IIRC, or somewhere around there (again been years since I've listened to a set). The z5500 sub is closer to being "proper", but its still tuned really high at like 40Hz since it also has to cover the inadequacies of the 2" main speaker drivers. So it doesn't extend much below about 35-40Hz. You're missing the low lows entirely. And your high bass is going to be accentuated to the point of being "boomy". Not knocking it either, its a "fun" system to listen to I'm sure. Proper Frequency Responses (roughly / there's opinions on these): Subwoofer - 20Hz or lower if you can / as close to as possible - 80~120Hz or so Front Mains / Center - 60Hz-20,000Hz (full range) (crossover around 80-120Hz) Rears - Should be similar to front mains, but passable to have a higher crossover on these (or smaller speakers) Your best setup z5500's (from my recollection, again I could be off a tad): Subwoofer - 40Hz-250Hz All satellites - 150-16,000Hz You're missing sub 40Hz and above 16kHz roughly with those speakers as is. Nothing you can do about it as its the way they were tuned and built. You can EQ down the hot spots in the response, or EQ everything down to accentuate other spots. But either way you're still missing the lower octave and upper octaves.

Well, according to AMD the maximum temperature of the FX 6100 is 70*C. Since you don't care too terribly much about it, I say rock it up to that 70*C mark. Most of the overclocking forums say 60*C or less if you can do it, which is true. I think my FX 8350 is hitting like 63*C during p95 at 4.8GHz, 1.59v or so. I'm using a 240mm Coolermaster AIO kit on it. You'll hit a temperature wall long before you hit a voltage wall with the FX series. You can send upwards of like 1.7-1.8v through theses CPU's and they'll live........if you keep them cool enough. Maximum voltage per AMD is 1.55v.

Oh boy, another fake crisis with storage manufacturers? -_- I remember the "flooding" at WD (or was it Seagate?) like 10 years ago. They had the situation controlled and fixed within hours, but yet they blamed the "flood" for storage prices for like 3-4 years after the event. I expect similar to happen this time too. Never let a good crisis go to waste. -_- Kind of ironic how these crisis' only seem to happen when storage prices are decreasing.

I have my 8350 at 1.59v daily. If that helps any.

One sub should be capable of the full range itself. Neither of the Logitech subs do the full range since they're tuned to be boomy and loud. The purpose of adding another sub IS typically to fill in frequency gaps, but you typically see people using the same sub twice so they don't interfere with each other. Frequency gaps with normal equipment occurs from room placement. The size and shape of your room has just as much to do with audio as the speakers and subs do.

I will resay this again though too, kind of as a warning lmao. Audio gets addicting. If you're happy with it, enjoy it. We can always help you chase decibels and proper frequencies. Absolutely. Depends on the budget. Expect to spend about $300 ish on the lower end to get started if buying everything. $150 for a sub, $100 for amp / receiver, and $50 ish on speakers.

I mean you can keep them and use them. But they're still going to be limited by their physical size. A 2" driver can only move so much air to make sound. Dayton b452 air speakers are inexpensive and sound fantastic. The regular b452 speakers are like $30 a set. There's more expensive speakers too of course, I'm just talking low end of the budget. Up to you on that one. If you are just after thump, a receiver made in the last 10 years should do the trick from any good brand. Pioneer, Yamaha, onkyo, denon, all good. That will handle the majority of what you need. Speakers, add to taste lol. Subwoofer, you can't go wrong with the Dayton subs. Pick the size you can fit. They have 8" up to 15". The bigger ones get lower than the little ones.

This should do what you are wanting yes. It's not going to fix any inadequacies of the systems, but it will allow both to operate at the same time. Again, I would not dump too much money into these setups. They're not worth it when a Dayton set up beats the snot out of them for $200-250 or so. Keep in mind that budget speakers, amps, and subwoofers do exist. They will beat the z5500 set in every way. Not trying to be mean about it, just honest.

1. You want better control over the subwoofer you'll have to change the amplifier. All sub controls are usually tied to the amp. Some are in the receiver or speaker amp / dac, but 90% of sub controls are on the sub amp. The z5500 doesn't have those controls on the stock amp. I would NOT recommend a new amp, instead I'd look at a proper sub. The z5500 doesn't extend very low to begin with. Changing amps will not fix the enclosure tuning. 2. Make it easy on yourself and look at home theater receivers. Unless you have limited space, a receiver is the best bang for buck. Good dac, possible surround sound or 2.1 just depends on the amount of speakers you have, crossover controls, and good speaker power output. All in one package. If you have limited space and require a t amp we can figure that out too. 3. Nope. I'd start at a receiver plus a proper sub and go from there. 4. The reason the z625 sounds different is room placement and enclosure tuning. If it's tuned higher, which it is, it will sound louder at higher frequency than the one that's tuned lower since it's tuned higher. Your tuning frequency is where the sub sounds loudest at with same volume (most of the time). The z5500 needs a higher gain to get the 60hz range of the z625 set. Neither set is really proper since a sub should be 30hz or lower (lower the better) and upwards of 80-120hz on the high end. All those frequencies SHOULD be similar volume, but they're not in your instance. It's a fault of keeping the system stupid simple for gamers. A real sub fixes that.

You might get better sound out of just the z5500's honestly. Might be worth a try to use optical to them, and actually place the speakers properly. Subwoofer in a well insulated corner, preferably your "hot zone". Speakers placed properly around you. If you can't properly utilize the 5.1 with proper placement, you'll be much better off with a better 2.1 set.

I know I am too! Just need enough time to throw a couple builds together. Still have 6 more hours of school to do with kiddo this week, going to try to get it done this evening so I have the weekend to build.