Installation

If you take into account setting up both the Inspire 5.1 5300 speakers and Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum sound card in one go, it is bound to take you some time. Once you unpack the box contents of each product you soon realize there is more to do than a "simply plug in a cable and all systems are go" routine. Initially, installing the card and Audigy drive in a spare 5.25" bay is relatively simple. One thing to remember though is to be careful and align the 40 pin grey cable (similar to a 40 pin IDE cable) properly on both the Audigy drive and Audigy sound card.  By missing one row of pins you’ll soon find either some of the connectors on the Audigy drive fail to work, or the remote control will not operate. Luckily, the cable will only go in one way as each end has a slightly different connector. The other black rounded cable is used to connect to the sound card to the onboard SB1394 (FireWire) port found on the Audigy drive. The last of the pack is the CD Digital audio cable which is used for conveying digital audio from an audio disc; this connects the sound card with your CD/DVD ROM drive. Once all that is done fully sliding in the Audigy drive and allocating a PCI slot for the Audigy Platinum sound card is no problem. I recommend that it’s installed using the sequence described above as failing to do so will cause difficulty in attempting to insert the cables once both devices are nested within the system.

Setting up the Inspire 5.1 5300 speakers is down to how envious one is of true 5.1 sound. Doing the job properly would require appropriate speaker positioning around the room. Drilling suitable holes, then connecting each cable from every speaker takes time. On average, you can expect it to take 30 minutes or more if things are to be done with quality in mind. Once that is done and any obstructive wires are either fed under the carpet or wooden flooring, things can take shape. Creative doesn’t supply any wall mounting screws but that is a minor set back as virtually any 30-40mm in length screw will work well. There is another method if drilling holes in a wall seems a step too far, namely the desktop positioning speaker technique. Although this won’t provide the true feeling of Dolby Digital surround sound it will surface and fortunately enough, Creative supplies stands for all satellites. Keep in mind that the rear speakers still need to be behind the listener’s ears, otherwise sounds will collide with each other making it hard to determine where the sound is originating from.

Connecting the cables is an easy task as all audio sockets are labelled on the subwoofer. Creative supplies stickers enabling to identify the speakers one by one. It’s a good idea to label front left/right, center and rear left/right speakers using them. The final step is making the sound card capable of outputting audio to the speakers. For this, a triple stereo audio cable is supplied. As the Inspire 5.1 5300 speakers are analog, the correct connections are as follows: Rear out (Black), Line out (Green) and Analog/Digital out (Orange). The wired speaker volume control plugs into its own socket clearly marked at the rear of the subwoofer.

Installing the drivers is a breeze, once Windows has loaded and we have informed it not to search for any drivers, all that’s left to do is insert the Platinum/PlatinumEx installation CD and follow on-screen instructions. It might be a good idea to insert the two provided AAA batteries into the remote control at this point. To test the speaker setup, you can run AudioHQ from the Control Panel, where you later select speaker to determine all front and rear channels are working. At the time of writing, there were no publicly released Windows XP drivers, however we found that using the Windows 2000 drivers on the installation CD worked fine.

Full installation of both the sound card and speakers isn’t quick and requires some effort from the user; however this is largely down to the sheer number of connections needed to get the system up and running. As long as one sticks to the instructions and doesn’t try and rush, this is not too difficult to set up.

Installation is simple once you know where to plug in the various cables internally and externally.

Installation annoyances

Without problems, life would be too simple. The same trend followed us as we installed the hardware, setting it up for testing and evaluation. Although we experienced a few problems during installation, there was one very noticeable and unfortunately pitiful aspect that we couldn't avoid. Speakers are wonderful creations, bringing music around our ears, adding depth to what we see or feel. Of course not as they need connecting together, and how other to do this efficiently than by using wire cabling. We're not so much concerned on how many wires end up plugging into the subwoofer, but rather by the length they are. This namely itself is probably one of the biggest setbacks anyone can discover when connecting up the Inspire 5.1 5300 speakers.  If you want to know if 2 and 5 meter cables for front and rear speakers is long enough, then we can clearly answer: No. We're not a fussy team of people here at Tweak3D, and we're not even spurred by anger that easily... but we want to know why Creative insists that every room their speakers will ever be used in is the size of a bathroom? We kid you not. When you consider 5m of cable, you think it's long. But wait until you're at the stage of hiding the cabling under the carpet or laminate flooring and *presto* -- it'll hit you. Two meter for the front and five meter cables for the back are just not long unless your computer room is about the same size as your toilet. Sure, we could buy extra accessories and extend the lengths of each speaker wire, but surely Creative could make the default length a little bit longer. We recommend 5m for front speakers and 10m for the rear ones. Other than that we're happy to report no other annoying occurrences were noted.

Next Page