The other features... all handy...
Right, now that you’re utterly confused let’s get back on safe ground with the other connectivity options; the speakers, USB port and headphones. The inclusion of speakers on a product that’s being aimed at the gamer seems a bit odd to me. If I was buying this for home use, I’d being using my sound set-up running from my PC and I wouldn’t bother with the PLX486S-B1S’s speakers at all. For the purposes of the review I used the included cable and hooked them up and whilst they’re ok, they lack decent bass response, which is to be expected given their small size. If I was buying the PLX486S-B1S because I wanted an LCD to attend LANs with, again, I wouldn’t be using the speakers, I’d be on a headset at a LAN.
That said, I can see the point of including them if you want to make a panel with a wider appeal. In use you can’t see them and for general desktop work they do an adequate job... even if music and video audio is a bit on the tinny side. If you do run them, make sure you have that back panel cover clipped on, I’m sure it acts a bit like a woofer box, though others thought it was just my imagination.
Click for larger imageOf course, with the line in supplying sound to the speakers, plugging in the headphones cuts the speakers off and pumps the sound into your headphones instead. There’s no discernible degradation in sound quality between running your ‘phones from the PLX486S-B1S or directly from the soundcard. But, unless you use a USB headset, there is one glaring omission and that’s the lack of a microphone socket. Any gamer worth his or her salt uses some form of in-game comms or VoIP in pretty much any game they play online. iiayma have missed a big trick with not supplying a microphone input next to the headset.
Having my microphone and headphone sockets next to each other is essential really, I can’t think of any headsets that have a lead with a long enough split to allow you plug the headphones and microphone into different places. My PC sits under my desk, even using the front inputs I can’t plug into my microphone socket on my PC and then into the PLX486S-B1S for my headphones. Of course, all this is irrelevant if you use a USB headset as the single USB port will do just nicely.
